researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Belgium. He specializes in contemporary social and political thought, specifically French poststructuralism and critical theory. He has published articles on Foucault, Althusser, and Clausewitz and is currently working on his first book manuscript. He is confident that only Chrisjen Avasarala can solve the covid‐19 global crisis and what will ensue. In any case, he has rented a room on Luna just to be on the safe side.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank all the contributors to this volume. They made the work significantly easier than it could have been and put up with my delays without comment. I also wish to thank Marissa Koors at Blackwell for her support of this project. Great thanks to Bill Irwin, series editor. He was much more involved than I expected, for which I am truly grateful. He probably should have made me work harder, but I won’t complain.
My thanks go especially to Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, obviously for the joy that they brought to me and the world with the book series and the TV series, but also for their agreeing so readily and being so supportive for of a book on The Expanse and Philosophy. I relished reading the foreword they wrote for this volume and am especially thankful for it. I also wish to thank Nick Merchant at Alcon for help with securing permission for the cover photo—how wonderful! And let me also thank the wonderful actors who have brought the series to life for us on TV. To get to relive the novels through their interpretation is a wonderful experience.
I’d like to thank my wife, Janet, for letting me buy a bigger TV to watch the show on.
Foreword
Science fiction, like philosophy, is an act of critical imagination.
The heart of philosophy is how to think meaningfully about issues that defy measurement. Great questions of philosophy—what is the universe made from, how does the natural world function, what is life and how did it begin—give way over time to science as measurement and data collection provide evidence, answers, and definition. The elements are revealed not to be earth, air, fire, and water, but atoms and the things that make up atoms. The origin of life becomes a question of chemistry producing amino acids and evolution selecting for stable replicating structures. Philosophy moves forward into the realms where data and its interpretation don’t yet exist.
Science fiction is also a way to think about what we don’t yet know, but can imagine. Over time, even the most rigorously meant speculations of science fiction are shown to be inaccurate or else proven true and cease to be speculative. What was once Science Fiction becomes Fantasy, and the next generation of writers and artists, actors and game designers move on to places where the truth isn’t yet established.
And so, slowly, between the imagination of the artists and philosophers, and the discoveries of the scientists and engineers, the universe becomes better understood, the breadth of human knowledge is increased, and nature of culture is changed.
The Expanse is at its heart a collaborative project. As a series of novels, it began with two of us. As television show, it grew to include the efforts of literally hundreds of talented, engaged artists with specialties in set design, visual effects, acting, sound and lighting design, editing, and dozens more.
It also grew as an instance of popular culture through the efforts of fans and critics, marketing departments and online Lang Belta teachers, and the shared enthusiasm of people who came to the project and then brought other people in.
But it also began with the books that we read when we were growing up—Alfred Bester, Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, C. J. Cherryh, Harry Harrison. And with the historical figures and events back to pre‐classical times that we used as models for the events we imagined in our collective future. The taxonomy of what The Expanse is—where it begins, where it ends, what its boundaries are—is, like so many taxonomies, only clear at a distance. The border becomes much less defined as it is examined more closely.
And just as history—both the documented acts of real people and the literary and genre conversations that came before us—gave us a lens to make sense of our project, The Expanse is going on to provide a lens for other people to engage with their own stories, their own analyses, and their own contributions to the ever‐wider acts of cultural and intellectual creation.
This is not a book we wrote, but one we helped to inspire. In it, you will find arguments, observations, and opinions on a wide variety of philosophical subjects with The Expanse acting as a kind of touchstone for the conversation. It is gratifying in a way that’s hard to put in words to see the conversation we took from the generations before us carry through beyond the work we’ve done. It will challenge you, reframe some of your ideas, and—hopefully—leave you a little more awed, a little wiser, and a step or two further along your own intellectual journey.
Because philosophy, like science fiction, is an act of critical imagination.
James S. A. Corey
Introduction
Jeffery L. Nicholas
“I am that book!”
So declared Leviathan Wakes in 2011 when James S. A. Corey published it. And, to quote Chrisjen Avasarala, they weren’t bullshitting. The Expanse series is a phenomenal science fiction read that delves into the greatest questions of human life, a part of the “literature of progress” that challenges our everyday world by thrusting human life out to Mars, the outer planets, and worlds beyond the Ring Gates.
And when The Expanse premiered on the SyFy channel, it declared with equal strength: “I am that show!” You know the one, the one we’ve been searching for that is better than any other sci‐fi series out there. The Expanse TV series has wonderful characters, cast, and filming, and dialogue that pulls us in and doesn’t let go.
The TV series is particularly phenomenal for me. See, I suffer from aphantasia—pictures don’t populate my brain like they do most people, and it’s not from some transcranial magnetic stimulation. I feel empathy just fine, and when reading books, I lose myself in the characters. But I don’t see the Roci searching the stars for a safe harbor or picture Jules‐Pierre Mao kneeling at the feet of Avasarala. Watching the Rocinante on screen, seeing the torture that Naomi goes through to save people’s lives, only makes me love the books and the characters more.
You are here, reading this book, because you love the books, the series, or both. And we too, the authors of the chapters you hold in your hands like Joe Miller holds Julie’s necklace, we love The Expanse. These chapters sing our love to you. They sail through this shared world, both books and TV series. We look at the challenges of flying our Epstein drive into space, explore the challenges of populating different worlds around Sol and out beyond the Ring Gate. Like Avasarala we interrogate our characters: Miller, Holden, Amos, Bobbie, Naomi, and, of course, Avasarala herself. I’ve seen online people wondering who would win a fight, Amos or Bobbie, but we’re interested in who’s more evil, Amos or Avasarala, and who might be good, Naomi or maybe Holden? We examine the costs of interstellar migration and wonder if it’s worth the cost or whether we even have a choice.
The chapters in this book cover the first five seasons
