EDIT: Thanks for the recommendations! I'm saving this subthread to favourites and will start with one of the books you mention as soon as possible.

The other books suggested here, Player of Games and Excession are also quite good, but nothing beats Phlebas for sheer energy.

Well, opinion anyway!

P.S. The State of the Art, a collection of short stories with a few Culture ones (including the namesake) is also a good introduction to some of the themes and ideas in the later novels.

It and Look to Windward were the two most memorable for me. A fabulous series that also repays rereading.

Well, except for that bit with the chair. Brrr.

Also the unabridged audiobooks are fantastic.

This makes me wonder if perhaps a deal with Amazon has already quietly been done? It would be a great shame if the Expanse got cancelled. I think it's genuinely the best sci-fi show around right now.

That's how I came across the show, after initially ignoring those placements for a few months because I didn't know how good it was and I wasn't in the mood for e.g. another "monsters" sci fi show (something I'd come to associate the SyFy channel with).

So, I watched season 1. Not too long after, season 2 launched. Amazon Video U.S. (integrated into the Prime video pages, or vise versa) had a "purchase" option for "day after broadcast" access. I purchased it and watched it. I don't remember how heavily it was promoted on the Amazon pages; I think there was at least some promotion.

Some time later, I revisited, wondering about that status of season 3. It turned out that U.S. Prime had picked up season 2. I was surprised as I'd seen absolutely zero promotion to that effect. Maybe because I'd already purchased season 2, but I'm far from certain about this.

Season 3 is now underway. And you can purchase "day after broadcast" access to it on U.S. Prime. Despite having watched both season 1 and 2, and actually paying Amazon for season 2, I've seen not one instance of promotion or listing of season 3, on U.S. Prime/Video web pages. Not one promotional email from them. Nada.

I was rather surprised at this. Amazon endlessly nags me to purchase things I'm not interested in (as well as a few that might interest me). And yet they make zero effort to upsell me on something I've already purchased?

Draw your own conclusion. To me, it seems as if they are for some reason actually actively hostile towards the show, now.

It is a shame... Expanse was very high quality sci-fi show.

The show, I couldn’t get through the first season for the action and dialogue. The story was very compressed, and even in the books wasn’t deep enough to withstand compression.

But... I seem to be just about the only person to feel that way here! I feel like I read different books and watched a different show. I realize that taste has a huge variability, and I accept that, but I usually have a better grasp on why others love something I didn’t. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t love or hate it, I just think of it as bathroom/beach/airplane reading?

RE hardness, I'd say it's 90% hard by volume. The protomolecule is a core plot point, but its magical properties aren't big part of the story, by volume (with possible exception of Cibola Burn). Beyond that, the only "out there" elements are the absurd fuel efficiency of the Epstein drive, and the plausability-stretching stealth tech. But it may be that my threshold for hardness is lower than yours. I wonder what other things you would classify as not being properly hard?

I guess to me hard sci-fi = “physically possible” and that might not be fair. As I said though, I don’t mind soft sci-fi, because after all it is fiction and that’s fun. It’s just, if you’re going to throw magic into the mix, why not have at it?

For me, I don't mind fantastical elements (FTL drives, wormholes, etc) as long as the rules they work by are consistent. Beyond that what makes SF 'Hard' for me is that they take real physics and explore it's consequences. That's the core of it.

For example, many of Larry Niven's stories are hard SF to me because he explores physical phenomena and their consequences. His characters encounter neutron stars and Neutronium objects, they encounter an anti-matter solar system, in one story there is a battle between buzzard ramjets which at the time he wrote it seemed like physically possible devices. OK so his characters often had to use magic FTL or other fantasy tech to get into those situations, but that doesn't change the fact that there is real science and (as far as he could get) plausible exploration of it in the books. That's all I ask for in hard SF.

As for the Expanse, they put in a lot of effort to show realistic zero gravity manoeuvring, fairly realistic space weaponry and habitats, including realistic effects of spin 'gravity'. Even the sociology was reasonably plausible. They picked a few specific things to 'break' physics for the purposes of enabling the rest of the stories to happen, and I'm ok with that.

Out of curiosity, are you basing this on anything or is it just your feeling?

Name one other thing recently on air that's realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.

Closest thing that comes to mind would be NatGeo's Mars series, but that's half documentary, half speculative concept art, and definitely very niche. Beyond that, there's nothing. Before that, we had the trio of Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian, the former two being sorta-hardish if you squint hard enough. And before we had 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that's it.

It's difficult to make a space show that's both true to physics and fun/engaging at the same time. Most authors don't bother with "true to physics" part. The Expanse succeeded at both, because an excellent team took great source-material and expanded on it, instead of butchering it like usually happens. The result was a show that was interesting to non-space geeks, that still gave accurate picture of how space works. If someone asked you, "I wonder why they're doing X", or "I wonder why they didn't do Y", your answer would likely contain some explanation of real-world physics. This is how you give regular people intuition about concepts they're not encountering daily.

So yeah, losing the only show about near-future space exploration that's both engaging and highly realistic - I think it's a bad day for both science outreach and science fiction.

The quality (from a narrative and acting viewpoint primarily) is so low that I think it drives people away from the topic. I desperately love space-y sci-fi but the space exploration really needs higher quality productions than this.

It is of course, super subjective, and I do understand that people like the show. I'm one of the (probable) minority of techies who dislike this specific show.

Beyond that how about non-sci-fi TV series? I'd like to know what you think are shining examples of television. Maybe 3 to 5 examples of non-sci-fi.

I know this sounds aggressive, but really, without knowing what kind of TV shows you think are "good", your opinion that The Expanse being bad, is without context. Maybe we like the same shows in general, but this one show is the exception. Who knows.

Also, maybe you watched the first 4 episodes and dismissed it as junk. That would make some sense to me, as the first few episodes were a bit rough. Or maybe you watched the entire thing, season 1 and 2, and it just wasn't for you.

Space Sci-fi TV:

I think the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica was great.

Non sci-fi:

I think Babylon Berlin is good.

I only watched the first series of The Expanse.

It's very subjective - if you enjoyed it then I'm glad. I'm certainly not in the majority among my friends in disliking The Expanse, but also not alone.

See, we have that in common. I may have to check out Babylon Berlin. Per your mention, I checked out the wikipedia entry for it. I do like a good period drama, as well as detective shows. Inspector Morse comes to mind. Anyway, I appreciate the exchange.

Did you watch Lewis? I enjoyed that.

Babylon Berlin is also one of those things that are particularly relevant at the moment as there are lots of parallels between the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the current state of the west.

I look forward to Babylon Berlin, for exactly the reasons you mention.

ive seen a couple people express this opinion in the thread, and i am wondering where it comes from. imo the plot and acting in the expanse is on par with all but the best currently airing shows. shows like the chi and fargo are certainly more sophisticated and have much more emotional depth, but the expanse easily equals the big action-oriented series (GoT, walking dead, homeland, all the super hero series), and only maybe GoT or westworld comes close to the world-building aspect. maybe it's just my hard sci-fi fanboyism showing.

Disclaimer: I only watched the first series, and I know most people actually like the show. Subjective dislike abounds here: you can prefix "In my eyes only" to every sentence below. I speak about the show, not the books here.

So first thing that struck me is that I'm not emotionally invested in any character. I'm not rooting for anyone. I don't care about them, and they don't have any drives or characteristics that immerses me. They are wooden, shallow, unrealistic caricatures of banal archetypes.

Amos is probably the most obvious example: he is a grab bag of overly obvious machismo and pulp tough-guy slapped together in such a way that he is concurrently completely unremarkable, unrelatable, and unbelievable. Every time he got on screen I would lose immersion and start wondering how the writers could settle for such cheap tactics and obvious low effort characterization - they basically bludgeon us with a few standard examples of machismo and violence. I end up completely uncaring about the character and I don't identify with any of his supposed drives. It just screams artifice.

Another example: the same obviousness and wooden characterization goes for Avasarala, but it's compounded by properly bad acting. I don't know what happened here - Aghdashloo was heart-achingly convincing in _House of Sand and Fog_, and her voice is so beautiful that one would think she'd be able to carry any role. But no - Avasarala is a character so badly scripted that I go from watching the story to irritation in 2 seconds flat.

In a variety of ways this goes for all characters. One cannot get a grip on their internal worlds and start caring about them - what should've been the complexity and contradiction inherent in human behaviour comes across as accidentally acting in a way counter to their shopworn character traits. Why does Miller care about Julie? Instead of adding meat (his exception to his internal rule) to Miller's character it just feels inconsistent with the rest of his actions. They flap about in thinly disguised cliché suits - thereby often acting unexpectedly in completely uncharacteristic ways (think Naomi for example), so they just come across as unbelievable.

The world building is also so-so. For instance, I found the Belter patois to be more irritating than supportive, mainly because it comes and goes in various amounts without enough consistency. The whole backstory is also a bit... bland? Made up of cheap tropes? Two untrustworthy governments with tension between them, a possible but oh so avoidable war, oh wow that one is a double agent all along, a group of disadvantaged blue-collar outsiders being manipulated by everyone, meh. The politics is so cartoonish and predictable as to break immersion, again. Oh, and how many hackneyed sci-fi inanities do they want to repeat? Hypoxia much?

The acting: least said, soonest mended.

The random violence. I don't care about the characters, and I don't worry if they live or die, and the violence is still so unexpected and over the top that I still roll my eyes. Also, Amos again. How do characters go from trying actively to kill each other to backing each other up in a fight in 5 minutes?

The CG is good, though.

If the show doesn't make you emotionally invested in characters, then no surprise you didn't like it.

I can sorta see where you're coming from. I picked up books only after watching whole S1, and then I re-watched S1. I definitely remember that the first time around, I felt that main characters are sort of... meh. Not bad, but also not very good. Just interesting enough to keep watching. The second time around I loved it, so I guess the show simply doesn't do a good enough job of letting the characters stand on their own, without the book background.

You mention Amos and I'd say you're right about him - he seems... arbitrary, without the book background. The source material does much better job at fleshing the character out. I could say the same thing about all the other examples you gave, except for Avasarala. I don't know why, but for some reason, I was in love at first sight.

RE tropes, can you give an example of a show you liked, that didn't have irritating world-building? RE that and acting, for some reason I seem to have much higher tolerance for that than a lot of my friend. I just don't notice, as long as it's not total tragedy.

It's a shame, and a bit of a failure on the part of the show runners, that you'd have to be a fan of the books to be a fan of the show.

Could you go into more specifics? Also noting whether any particular applies to the show, the books, or both, and whether it's from a perspective of someone who only knows the show vs. someone who also read the books? I'm not asking in order to argue, I'm just curious about the difference in perspective.

i know some people criticize holden's somewhat bland character, which is not entirely unfair. if perhaps unintentional, i think this still serves a purpose. the world of the expanse is very unfamiliar and, basically being a normal dude from earth, he gives the viewer a character to anchor themselves with, or even substitute themselves for. it's kinda like how gordon freeman never talks.

It's not just that, though. In this context, "Space" and "sci-fi" are nothing more than plot devices that allow them to do the same thing all serials are doing these days: escalation. There is almost never a happy ending, never closure on anything, always something new and "bigger" lurking behind the scenes. Almost as if actual "creativity" is being substituted with "size" in some non-physical sense. "Heroes" is a clear example of it.

Person of Interest is on WP’s list of hard sci-fi, but isn’t about space. (This surprises me a little, it never struck me as accurate and I lost interest in the show fairly quickly.)

I mention that in part to call out that this thread is equating sci-fi with outer space. There are plenty of non-space scientific topics on earth that are covered in movies and TV. Making hard sci-fi only about space might be missing a general trend toward more rigor about science in general.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction#Televis...

Worth noting that Expanse is not on WP’s list. Nor are Gravity, Interstellar or The Martian. Gravity is a good example of the story intentionally breaking whatever hard science might have been there.

What I do see across all the genres is a peak of interest in space between maybe 1965 and 1995. Perhaps most important is writing, short stories and novels, since those often fuel TV & films.

If I look at the trend based only on this WP page, it does look like 1990-2010 was a trough and that space is trending again.

My argument was implicitly about space-related sci-fi, because I was arguing about its impact on interest in space exploration :).

> Worth noting that Expanse is not on WP’s list.

Both the books and the show have received Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval; that IMO matters more than being on a Wikipedia list :).

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval....

Hmmm maybe I’ll have to give it another go. Does it get better after the first season?

- It has some great discussion and presentation of modern surveillance state issues, including predicting Snowden. That is, it actually had an NSA whistleblower before the Snowden leaks happened.

- It stays up to date with infosec topics, and uses them, instead of inventing bullshit. Among other things, the show featured Stuxnet-based exploits (with Stuxnet code dumps visible), and a successful Shellshock attack just months after the story broke.

I loved the acting, loved the story, loved the way it discussed the friendly/unfriendly AI topics, loved the humour. I was deeply saddened that it got cancelled without advance warning, and had to wrap up all the major plot points in the second half of the last season.

(Also for those who like the writing of Westworld, Person of Interest was the previous show of that team.)

The TV Series started off excellently, and I think they've cast some excellent actors. Unfortunately, some of them just grate on my nerves. I'm just not convinced by Steven Strait's performance - the character he plays (Holden) is supposed to be a shortsighted idiot a lot, but Strait comes across as more of an emo kid.

The changes in the storyline, while I can understand some changes needed to be made due to the different medium, the whole current storyline in the season is just confused and the motivations of most of the players are unconvincing at best.

With the book series, I think I'm one or two full books behind, because I just lost interest. The Philipe+Father storyline could've been interesting, but instead it was boring.

Instead of focussing on a few main aspects, it's fragmented into dozens of storylines about all sorts of inconsequential and otherwise unimportant characters, and I feel like I need to carry a reference guide with each character's backstory to-date on me to be able to follow everything.

While I'll be sad to see the TV Series die, this will be mainly be because I doubt I'll see Shohreh Aghdashloo or Wes Chatham play roles quite like those again.

I gave up after book 5 (I think) but I only really enjoyed books 1 and 2 (and parts of book 3) and couldn't face another few hundred pages of "will anything interesting actually happen any time soon?".

The characterisation got dry very rapidly (almost all of the characters are unsympathetic and boring) but that wasn't so much of a problem in the first couple of books because plot and world building drove them much more. By book 3, the world building was pretty much done and the plot seemed to become much more formulaic and the "big picture" development just got frozen it seemed. The series turned into something different which I didn't want to read.

I tried watching the TV series but gave up much earlier as I didn't think it translated properly - in TV characterisation is much more important because it's what drives shows so the flaws showed much earlier. It didn't help that the acting was pretty bad too (who knows whether because of actors or script - probably both).

Clearly. Such a shame too, to waste the first Trek series where the main character is a black woman, and also not a starship captain. Unfortunately, it's all just one big cheese-fest from start to end.

>> The same applies to the JJ Abrams reboot movies.

As a long-term proud trekkie (sorry) I wonder what the general opinion is about the rebooted universe. I personally agree with you, that it's Trek without the Trek, like an ice cream cone without the ice cream, but I wonder what others think.

Star Trek is sometimes credited for bringing up an entire generation of scientists and engineers. Can you imagine someone 20 years from now saying something like that about Discovery, or the reboot movies, with a straight face?

> As a long-term proud trekkie (sorry)

Don't be. I'm a trekkie too :). In fact, I owe my career in computing and general interest in science and space to Star Trek (TNG in particular), which I watched as a kid/teenager.

The TOS heavily influenced me into electrical engineering, especially Spock building something to save the day, such as the mnemonic memory circuit with stone knives and bear claws.

Hah, I did the same when I was ~10. With a friend, we went out to the park behind some trees where people were dumping appliances, and collected 2 bags of scrap electronics. My mother wasn't too happy when I brought it all home.

I felt much the same to start with, but by the end of the season I had mostly forgiven it.

At the end of it, my main annoyance is that Those. Are. Not. Klingons.

Whatever they are, they've clearly had a species-wide Groupon deal on massive dental reconstruction surgery. Not a single one of them can speak without sounding like they're trying to talk around a half-dozen pairs of socks that've been jammed into their mouth, and then had their jaw wired shut.

I'll still not forgive JJ Abrams for his Star Trek 90210 with Super Lens Flares reboot of Trek which completely ignored all the history. Then the obnoxious jerk has the temerity to lie to us outright "No, Bennedict Cumberbatch isn't Khan, it's a surprise!" when the trailers all made that clear.

If he were deliberately trying to sink the series, he couldn't have done a better job.

JJ's Trek Hack-Job is second only to the travesty that was the 2004 I, Robot film.

VFX is not enough. At least not for TV.

But if you look back at shows like BSG or Firefly, they certainly weren't any better in terms of acting - I think we just have higher standards these days!

(By the way, if you didn't enjoy Season 1 (I did!), then you won't like Season 2 any better.)

But not really everything applies. BSG - which I absolutely love - wasn't based on a series of good books, wasn't hard sci-fi, and didn't have a VFX team doing their best to stick to real physics.

And even more so I recommend the books.