From Before the Beginning to Past the End

It is fair to say that I got a little obsessed over The ExpanseThis series is set in a future where humans have colonized the Solar System, but then have to contend with alien tech that upends their whole civilization.. This is my way with books I like. Once I find an author I’m into, I have to read everything they’ve done because I’ve finally found a writing style I can stand and a world I can invest in. Sure I came to The Expanse because of the TV series, but then I read the books and really enjoyed the books and wanted to keep reading them even though they aren’t small tomes at all. This is a dense book series comprising nine volumes, and you get a very rich story once you’ve gone from beginning to end.

And then there’s more. While they were writing the novels the two authors who collectively wrote as James S.A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) also wrote a series of short stories and novels set in their world. These stories weren’t directly connected to the events seen in the main novels, didn’t follow the heroes of the books as they went around their adventures. Instead these stories informed the world, adding to backstories or side events, to show readers what happened, was happening, and would eventually happen in this detailed universe that was created.

Of course, if you’ve seen the series you likely will know a few of these. Many of these stories were adapted into parts of the shows, sometimes used for dialogue from the characters, other times fully shown as events in the series. But there’s a lot of material, and it’s interesting to go to all of it having read all the main books, just to get one more taste of this world before I have to move on and read something else. It’s a bit like letting go. This is the last taste of The Expanse I’ll get, and I decided to savor it.

Drive

Since this is a short story collection, it seems better to look at each tale on its own instead of simply blanket reviewing the collection. We start with the first story, the earliest in the whole The Expanse cycle, chronologically, going back to before space travel was nearly as easy as it’s depicted in the books (which, even then, isn’t that easy).

We go to the creation of the Epstein Drive, which we learn was created as a lark. One man, Solomon Epstein, has a junked space yacht that he plays with as a lark, and he does a minor upgrade to the engine. At least, he thinks it’s just a little upgrade, but then the drive takes off, he gets plastered into his chair from the inertial, and he has to fight to try and stop the ship since it’s going too fast, too hard, and there’s likely no way anyone can get to him, ever, to save him. In the end, after thinking back about how he met his wife and how he’s functionally left her behind in this ship that won’t stop, he realizes that, in a way, he’s taken care of her and she’ll never want for anything. This drive will change spaceflight… he just won’t be alive to see it.

“Drive” was adapted into bits of an episode of the second season of The Expanse, "Paradigm Shift", but I think the story is actually better here. It’s only seven pages, but where we only saw Epstein and heard him narrate what he was going through on the ship, in the story we get to see his life before the fateful drive test. We learn how he met his wife, fell in love, got married, and it has more emotional weight to it than the episode. This story wasn’t the focus of that episode, of course, it was just background filler, but I like being able to focus on it here and see the real tragedy of the fate of the man who changed space travel forever.

The Butcher of Anderson Station

Much like with “Drive”, I think “The Butcher of Anderson Station” works better in the context of the novella collection than it did on the show. Its focus is Colonel Fred Johnson, the leader of an assault team sent to Anderson Station to fight the Belters that took over the station. Johnson is a government man, but he doesn’t feel the need to kill innocents. The Earth government doesn’t feel the same way and despite his protestations, a slaughter happens under his command. This leaves him reeling, rejecting the accolades dumped upon him and retreating into the Belt to get whatever justice the Belters decide to give him. Instead, they give him a new life with them.

As with “Drive”, “The Butcher of Anderson Station” was adapted in bits and pieces in a single episode of The Expanse, the first season episode "Back to the Butcher". But while we see some small version of the events that happened at Anderson Station here, we don’t get the full scope of how it affected Fred Johnson and changed him into a warrior fighting for the Belt. The slaughter was called a heroic moment, the point where the Earth fought back against rebels, but Johnson knew the truth. It was done in his name, and he had blood on his hands. He could shake it, couldn’t wash it away, and was ready to let the Belters kill him. Only because they saw a resource that could be put to good use, encased in a man who felt real regret, did they choose otherwise.

The events are more powerful here because you understand why the Belters would save this man and keep him alive. He didn’t just disappear into the Belt and somehow take over a space station to aid the Belt; they saw who he was and used him for their gain. It was far more mutual and symbiotic. This was something the show didn’t really give us and I think it’s necessary detail that makes the short story more relevant.

Gods of Risk

At 75 pages, Gods of Risk is the first story in the collection that verges towards novella length. In the story we see Bobbie Draper, former USMC Marine trying to find a path in life after leaving the Corps. She’s shunned by a lot of groups because she not only helped Earth but also quit the Corps., and she feels like she’s adrift. An offer from Avasarala to work with Earth is tempting, but Bobbie is all Mars. She can’t just leave her home. Things shift for her, though, when her teenage nephew gets caught up with drug dealers and Bobbie has to bail him out.

Bobbie doesn’t appear in the meat of the fourth book as that novel, Cibola Burn, takes place on a different planet beyond the ring gates and Bobbie, working on Mars, has little to do with the story. The authors included her in the prologue for the novel so they could bring her back later and readers wouldn’t forget who she was, but that did leave quite a gap for the character when the fourth season of the show came along and the series had to do something with the actress playing her. Gods of Risk serves as inspiration for her storyline in that fourth season, although the series greatly expands the story and adds a lot of other material to it. Instead of helping her nephew and freeing him from this group, on the series she gets her nephew out and then joins with them so she can investigate the seedy underbelly of Mars and see what’s really going on.

I like how tight the novella is since it clearly shows us what Bobbie was up to during the fourth novel and lets her be herself without compromising her morals. At the same time, though, Bobbie is a great character and I would have loved more of her in every book of the series. The show had to invent a lot for her based on events in the novels, and that’s fair. I think she’s a great character and keeping her around for more adventures is never bad.

But there is a tightness to this novella that can’t be denied. Like her actions in the Corps., Bobbie here is efficient and effective, coming in when her nephew needs help and getting the job done. You can appreciate a character that can assess a situation, sees what needs to be done, and simply does it. Bobbie was a hammer, and this problem was a nail. It leaves Gods of Risk feeling tight and effective in a way the series couldn’t handle because it had to expand her role.

The Churn

Interestingly, the story collection puts The Churn fourth in the list even though, technically, it takes place before the first novel of the series, Leviathan Wakes. The rest of the stories are in chronological order, but not The Churn, and I’m not certain why that is. Regardless, the story is all about Amos Burton just… not the Amos Burton you might expect. The story is really about Timothy, the kid that will become Amos Burton, although if you hadn’t already seen the TV series you might not have known that.

The novella was used as background for the fifth season plotline following Amos back to Earth so he can finish up business in Baltimore and the surrounding area. In the novella, Timothy was a street kid living with a woman who both is mother figure (without being his actual mother) and his lover. He gets a job with a crime boss, Amos Burton, and proves himself effective and ruthlessly executing orders. But Timothy doesn’t really work for anyone, and he does what he thinks he has to in order to survive. That could prove to be good or bad when the cops come around and start putting pressure on the crime gangs, driving the crime boss to take risks that Amos doesn’t agree with.

It’s interesting to go back and see Timothy before he was Amos. The kid is a fully formed character and we already know him well having read the various books of the series by this point (let alone watching him on the TV series). This novella even helped the actor who played Amos, Wes Chatham, find his character and understand who Amos really was. It’s an interesting character study for a kid who, as we know, doesn’t exactly view the world the way everyone else does.

With that said, I think it works better as implied backstory than it does as a real novella. The series hints at what happened in Timothy’s past via bits of dialogue and little comments, but it doesn’t show us his past. That leaves us far more intrigued, and willing to fill in details, than the novella does. The novella is explicit and it steals away some of the character’s mystique. It’s not a bad story, per se, but I think I like the story better when it is implied than I do having it written out for me.

The Vital Abyss

This is another novella that went on to influence events in the television series without us seeing a one-to-one translation of those events. Here we learn the fates of what happened to the Protogen scientists that were working on the protomolecule. We see their capture in the first book, and then they effectively disappear, captured and contained by the Belters and not mentioned again. That’s because the Belters effectively don’t know what to do with them, so they keep the scientists in permanent captivity, locked in a massive room together with absolutely no privacy. So there’s fighting, and power plays, and eventually someone trying to curry the favor of the Belters when they’re given some protomolecule data to play with. But it’s Paolo Cortázar who eventually gets the attention of the Belters and proves his worth, and, as we know from later novels, he is eventually put in charge of the Laconia research division working on the protomolecule.

From the perspective of the television series, Cortázar doesn’t seem like a vital character. He shows up primarily to push the plot forward in seasons two and three of the series, which follows the second novel, Caliban's War. He then vanishes and we don’t see him again in the series. In the novels, though, Cortázar plays a vital role. He goes from one of many scientists to eventually leading Laconian science while he attempts to make their emperor, Winston Duarte, immortal. Getting to see who he was before he joined Protogen, and then seeing his history after, informs us of a villain who otherwise is rather cartoonish in the novels. It adds nuance and shading to the man so, in that regard, The Vital Abyss is an important story.

With that said, Cortázar does vanish from the novels for a long stretch, so it would have just as easily been a case where the authors made up someone new and had them act as the head of science on Laconia instead of bringing back someone from many novels earlier. It’s nice they followed up with this character and showed us what happened in between, but unlike the title of this story, it didn’t really feel “vital”. Cortázar is a flawed man who turns himself evil, which is interesting, but not interesting enough to actually make me care about his character at all.

Strange Dogs

This is the last of the stories adapted into The Expanse, sitting as prologue pieces for each of the six episodes that made up the last series. While much of the sixth season is taken up with the war in Earth’s system between Marcos Inaros and the Earth-Mars-Belt alliance, each episode shows us a little of what’s going on at Laconia to hint at what could eventually come should, in twenty or thirty years, The Expanse return to adapt the last three novels into television. It’s a bold play to adapt this story into the show even if we never see anything more from the series after.

In the novella, we’re introduced to Cara, a pre-teen girl who was born on Earth but has spent the better part of her life on Laconia. For her, Earth isn’t home; Laconia is. She knows the forests around her settlement as well as any streets she’s seen, and she loves the wildlife that lives on the planet. Unfortunately, while she cares about the wildlife she does also accidentally kill some of the animals by feeding them. Her food isn’t compatible with their digestion, and he kills a creature she calls a “sunbird”. Distraught, she wants to save the sunbird’s little chicks, but eventually she meets weird, dog-like creatures who take the bird’s corpse and, when they return, the bird is alive. Different, but alive. She remembers this when her little brother dies soon after. But while she was overjoyed at what the strange dogs could do, her parents won’t be nearly as accepting.

Strange Dogs is the first taste of what would come on Laconia. These creatures, via protomolecule science, can resurrect anything. This isn’t so weird for Cara since Laconia is her home and she’s seen all kinds of weird things living there, weird things that aren’t weird to her. But resurrection of the dead is something humans can’t accept, and this leads Cara and her brother, Xan, to flee their home and live out in Laconia’s woods… at least until they are caught and become lab rats for Cortázar (see, he does come back at least). It’s a tragic story that shows humanity may be ill equipped to handle all that these new worlds have to offer.

As the only taste many television watchers may have of Laconia, Strange Dogs makes for interesting fodder on the series. But for book readers, this first taste of Laconia hints at everything that could happen, especially for a key character that would return later. In that regard, this is one of the few truly essential stories in Memory’s Legion that I think anyone who would otherwise simply stick to the main novels should absolutely read.

Auberon

We move forward into the time of the Laconian Empire, having conquered all the many thousands of human systems opened up by the gates. This sets us towards Auberon, a planet that is one of the few with a biological system similar enough to Earth that humans could eat the plants and animals of Auberon and not get sick and die. It’s a weird, random twist of biology that makes Auberon one of the most vital planets among the connected worlds. So a new Laconian governor, Biryar Rittenaurm, comes to oversee the planet and keep it on track for Laconian rule. The only issue is that the government of Auberon is corrupt to its core, ruled by a criminal underworld that isn’t going to be easy to displace.

This story is interesting as it ties up one of the loose ends raised early in the novel series that we wouldn’t have expected to follow up otherwise. The fifth novel, Nemesis Games, introduces us to Amos’s past life in Baltimore and shows us his old colleague, Erich. After the asteroids hit Earth and turn it into a wasteland, Amos convinces Erich to join him in finding a ship and leaving the planet. Erich, a criminal kingpin, looks forward to what he will do next now that he’s left all that he knew behind. Auberon gives us that answer: he finds a new planet and sets up shop. And it just so happens to be one of the most vital planets in the connected worlds, meaning Erich does pretty alright by himself.

That alone makes this story interesting, seeing Erich so many years later acting in a kingpin position some place new. Erich, honestly, is far more interesting than Rittenaurm, the actual protagonist of this story, and you can tell the authors really just wanted to check in with Erich one last time… and I have no problem with that. Erich showing up and doing his thing is a highlight of these stories and I am glad we got to spend one more little bit of time with him, even if it is against an opponent who is clearly outmatched since Rittenaurm simply can’t keep up with all that Erich has going on. Auberon isn’t the best story, but Erich does make it a highlight.

The Sins of Our Fathers

And speaking of tying up loose ends, we have one more to get to with The Sins of Our Fathers. This one features Filip Nagata, who we last saw bailing out on his father’s failed quest to destroy Earth and Mars and rule the remnants as Emperor of the Belt. Filip went off, hid who he was, spent decades under assumed names and never setting down roots, right up until he traveled into the Jannah system and ends up stuck there at their second colony on the planet, Beta, after the ring gate network dies. Now he’s there, waiting to see what happens next for one of the 1,300 human colonies that has to survive all on its own.

As the authors note, Filip acts as a symbol for this story. He’s a story that never got an ending, with him never learning his mother was still alive and her never realizing he lived as well. They never connected again, and went their separate ways. Then he ends up on a planet that could lead to survival for the colonists… or their eventual doom. We don’t get that story, we just get to see what Filip does when he’s stuck in a place and sees the old patterns forming again. He lived through Marcos’s reign and when he sees someone acting like his father all over again at this new settlement, he can’t stand by and let it happen again.

The story is about unfinished endings, about patterns repeating, about how humanity will survive in this new, disconnected age, and I think it says a lot about the scope of The Expanse. We get a slice of human history in these novels and stories, but there will always be stories that could be told, new futures that could be explored. The series never has to end, but ending it with the potential for more left unexplored means we have to accept the endings we get and appreciate what’s told. We’re not sure what happens to Filip next in his story and that’s fine. He finds some kind of closure and moves on, but the series, even if it came back, would move on without him regardless. We just accept what we can have and we have to move on as well.

Final Thoughts

This collection of stories is a tad uneven. Some are great, some are just simply check-ins. I appreciate the scope and complexity of many of these stories and I’m glad I got to read through them to get just a little more of The Expanse, even if this might feel like the last taste… except it isn’t exactly, as there are still comics to cover at some point, and we’ll get to them soon…