The Expanse

I didn't take to much advantage of the blogging vacation to gather new material. I was thinking to start the new year with "Tenet", and I could actually write enough about it. But not very positive stuff... So I decided for a subject on which I don't have so much to tell, but looks more promising: "The Expanse" a series where I didn't get far yet (I'm somewhere in the 2nd season of the 4 completed so far), sufficiently enough though to convince me.

Set somewhere in a future where mankind partially colonized the solar system, the action involves three power - the UN = Earth, Mars and OPA = Outer Planets Alliance = the asteroid belt. The first two are caught in a sort of cold war, and "the belt" gets the rebel part that doesn't get along with any of them but must serve both. In this context we have to narrative threads developing. One follows a crew of four that left a cargo ship to answer an emergency distress call, but soon they're the ones getting stranded in space. The other thread begins on Ceres, one of the belt stations, where a local cop gets a case of a missing girl, without any hope of actually solving it. Slowly the two paths merge, first towards the question of who and why is trying to start an interplanetary war.

The construction of the story might seem slow in the beginning, but was the most solid I've seen in a SciFi series in the last 10 years. Not that are many of these. "Killjoys" comes probably as the closest example, having there too an interplanetary conflict intrigue and (light spoiler) also an external enemy more dangerous than all it's known. Unfortunately "Killjoys" was completely buried by its last seasons, with an atrocious bad ending. For the political intrigue in "The Expanse", one of its good points, I've heard comparisons like "GoT in space", but I'd say that's actually even better than that = it slips less towards cheap soap. Moreover, within the limits of SciFi, which this is after all, it seemed to me very well grounded in the reality we know - e.g., the asteroids in the belt have their real shape, the gravity differs depending on where we're located in space, etc.

As I was saying, I didn't get too far with this, so as in any series case I don't know if I'll feel the same about it after the ending (I wrote a positive entry on "Killjoys" too in the beginning). As in GoT's case, this is also based on a series of novels, actually one awarded with a Hugo the year that just ended, which normally should offer a more solid guarantee for the story. Considering that the planned number of series is less than the number of published volumes, maybe this time we'll escape lame ending improvisations. We'll see...