Muskrat Love?

The first thing I did when I started this post was check the Labels to see what I'd written about The Expanse already. 

 

There is no Label for The Expanse.

OK, so I forgot to make a Label. That's fine. Blogger has a solid search function. I'll find my posts and reviews with that.

 

Plenty of matches but almost all of them for other Expanses, mostly the Svarni Expanse, a zone in EverQuest II. There was the odd mention of the TV series but only a line, here and there, in posts about other topics entirely. It seems I never reviewed the show at all, not even a single paragraph in a portmanteau post.

Well, that's strange. I watched all six seasons. Not like me not to have said something about them. But I didn't. I just scrolled back through all the posts labeled "TV" from 2022, when the final season aired on Prime, to when I first began writing about TV shows here which, somewhat to my surprise, was only in 2020. Posting about what I'd been watching started as a pandemic thing and never ended , apparently. A bit like Valheim's Early Access.

That kind of puts a rail gun round through the double hull of the post I was going to write. I can hardly reflect on what effect reading the books has had on my feelings about the TV series if I can't go back and refresh my memory on what those feelings might have been.

I mean, you can't expect me to remember, surely? I don't have that kind of self-starting memory. I have the kind that requires a catalyst for the reaction to begin. If I even see the cover of a book I read years ago or a still from a movie, everything slowly starts to come back but without some kind of stimulus, I got nothing.

Oh, yes, sure, I could go watch some clips on YouTube. The trailers usually do a good job of reminding me what went on. But it would be missing the point more than a little. I wanted to know what I thought about it then, not what being reminded of it makes me think now.

So we'll scrap that idea and just talk about the books, I guess. I just finished the ninth and final volume, Leviathan Falls. It took me about a month to read them all. Maybe it was a bit longer. I wasn't counting. 

I bought the entire series for £2.00 each in a charity shop last year. Or I thought I did. When I got to the end of the last one, that was when I found out there are actually nine books in the series, not eight, so I had to buy the last one pretty sharpish. Good thing I work in a bookshop. 

It was certainly a lot of reading to do in a shortish period, whatever. None of the books runs under five hundred pages so that's getting on for five thousand pages in total. It's an extremely easy read, though. It fairly races along. There are hardly any longueurs, at least not until the smattering of faux-poetic/surrealist "Dreamer" chapters turn up in the last book. Those did slow the whole thing down a tad.

The most notable thing for me was how incredibly closely the TV series seems to have stuck to the original. Not always a good thing in my opinion. I love adaptations the way I love cover songs and for the same reason; it's fascinating to see what changes. In this case not much changed. Not much at all.

I could almost literally see the scenes from the adaptation playing out in my head as I read the books. The characters are all exactly the same, with the possible exception of Bobbie Draper, and then only, presumably, because the casting director didn't manage to find a suitable Polynesian actor to play her. My friend, who watched and read all of this before me, says Amos is different in the books but I couldn't see it. Well, not until... but, no, spoiler... let's not go there.

Also in my head, everyone in the books sounds exactly like the actors who played their characters in the show because the dialog seems to be identical down to the inflection. Except I can't remember the dialog, so that must be subjective. Still true, though, I bet.

The one huge deviation, of course, is that Alex dies in the TV show, where he doesn't in the books. He got written out because the actor playing him did something Amazon didn't want to be associated with, i think. Can't remember what it was, if I ever even knew.

I knew, roughly, when Alex disappeared but even now I have absolutely no clue how the narrative changed in the show to allow for his absence. That was the point where I realized I wasn't so much remembering what happened in the show as re-watching the show by way of the book. 

I felt the narrative in general becoming less familiar after that. More divergent. I seem to remember Drummer having a much bigger part in the show than she does in the book, for a start. I also thought Filip ended up going dutchman with his father's ship, too, not going AWOL before it left port and thereby surviving.

If that's what happened. Filip literally never appears in the narrative afterwards.He barely gets a passing mention. I kept waiting for his plot-line to pick back up but it never does. Did I miss something?

There are a few moments like that but not many. Mostly, the two authors that make up the James S. A Corey gestalt (Ironic, that, isn't it? Given the ending of the series.) keep all the balls in the air and all the plates spinning. I bet they were glad to get to the end all the same.

The last few books, the ones that carry on "Thirty Years Later..." past the point where the show ended, feel a little different to the rest. The series starts off as a kind of gritty, near-future noir, confined to a single system and focusing on very human concerns but it ends up being a full-blown cosmic space opera, a universe-shattering battle with quasi-Lovecraftian Elder Gods from another dimension.

None of it really bears close examination, not if you're trying to avoid picking holes. At one point, quite late on, someone makes the observation that Holden and his crew seem to be extraordinarily lucky. Geez! You think? They have more lives than ninety-nine cats!

But that's just about the best thing about the series from my perspective. The older I get, the less time I have for stories that don't turn out well. I don't just want to like the characters I'm reading about, although I very much prefer it if I do. I like them to have a good time, too. I like a happy ending but I also like a happy beginning and a happy in-between if I can get them.

The Expanse is all happy endings. OK, not for the literally billions of people who die, many of them horribly. But they're just NPCs. We don't know them and we don't care about them. Almost everyone you could think of as even a minor supporting character either gets a noble death Doing The Right Thing or doesn't die at all. Even nearly all the baddies! 

In fact - no spoilers - some of them don't even die when they die!

Jim Holden is a total Pollyanna and I get the feeling the authors must be too. They really do want all their readers to have a good time. They even bring in a lovable dog towards the end for absolutely no reason I can see other than they thought it would be nice to have a lovable dog in the story. Talk about fan service!

That dog, though... If there's one moment when disbelief ceases to be suspendable it's when you think about how that dog stays happy and healthy through the same physical stresses that almost kill most of the crew. She's always described as smiling or grinning or having a great time, even when everyone else is getting crushed into paste by thrust.

And she's not even a young, fit dog! She's an old dog being subjected to G-forces that Corey spends paragraph after paragraph telling us are incredibly hard to survive, even in custom made crash couches, with huge doses of custom-designed drugs, some of which are amphetamines. 

Yet they can just get a dog on the spur of the moment and Amos somehow whips up a perfect dog-suitable equivalent in five minutes! And the dog doesn't just survive, she settles in and acts like she's been in space all her life!

Yeah, I had a problem with the dog. But don't start picking holes in the plot, that's my advice. So I'll stop. I really didn't have anything to say about The Expanse anyway, other than it's good and if you haven't seen it, you should see it and if you haven't read it, you should read it.

I might get the audiobook next...