Owlcat developing EXPANSE video roleplaying game inspired by MASS EFFECT

Owlcat Games are developing an action roleplaying game set in the world of the Expanse novels and TV series. Osiris Reborn is in development now and marks the developer's first non-top-down RPG project.

The game focuses on a Pinkwater Security mercenary trapped on Eros Station during a deadly lockdown. Presumably they escape during the chaos and gain control of their own ship, which they use to travel the Solar system in search of answers and money. The game will feature some crossovers with the TV show, with some of the actors reprising their roles. The game will feature multiple familiar locations from the extant IP, including Ceres, Ganymede and Mars.

Owlcat, currently based in Cyprus, with teams operating around the world, is best-known for their massive, in-depth adaptations of existing IP. They have released two huge RPGs based on the Pathfinder tabletop roleplaying game, Kingmaker (2018) and Wrath of the Righteous (2021), and the Warhammer 40,000 RPG Rogue Trader (2023). They are currently developing a new 40K RPG, Dark Heresy. Osiris Reborn is being worked on by a new team independently of those projects.

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is a marked shift for the company, as it will be a combat-heavy, over-the-shoulder action RPG focusing on a customisable captain character. Romances will be in the game. This is clearly heavily inspired by Mass Effect, in the same way their earlier games were heavily inspired by Baldur's Gate and its sequels. This is also the second video game project based on The Expanse, after The Expanse: A Telltale Series (2023).

Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey

The Laconian Empire has suffered a series of reversals in its war against the unknown entities that killed the creators of the protomolecule. The alien are conducting strange assaults on our reality, affecting consciousness and the laws of physics. High Consul Winston Duarte, whose enforced self-evolution to take on the aliens, is now MIA and the Empire is leaderless at the precise moment it is facing its greatest military challenges. As usual, it falls to the crew of the Rocinante to influence events and bring the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced to a successful conclusion...if that is even possible.

All epic stories have an ending, sometimes one that is full of fire and brimstone and lots of explosions and major character revelations, and sometimes one that is quiet and reflective and bit melancholic. Leviathan Falls, wrapping up The Expanse after nine books and eleven years, manages to do a bit of both. It's a book that, like many of its forebears, gives good space battle, but it also factors in an element of weariness to the narrative. Our central quartet of heroes and almost-heroes and not-really-heroes - Naomi, James, Alex, Amos - have been through hell and back many times over the thirty years they've been living with the threat of the protomolecule-builders and their even more enigmatic and dangerous enemies, whilst all around them various human factions have played their game of space thrones which have been more like messing around with musical chairs whilst the room itself burns.

You could be forgiven going into this finale thinking that Leviathan Falls will refocus the story on that conflict, which has mostly been relegated to enigmatic moments and epic cliffhangers in previous novels. Surprisingly, it doesn't. The battle for reality as we know it is instead relegated to a mostly off-page game of tug of war between a protomolecule-enhanced character and the unseen aliens banging on the walls of our reality (occasionally punching through with bizarre effects, like rewriting the laws of physics on a local level or knocking billions of people unconscious). Some may feel a bit let down by that, but given the strangeness of the aliens and the weirdness of the protoculture-powered technology opposing them, perhaps it was a wiser choice not to try to depict that cosmic struggle on page. Instead we get intermittent senses of the history of that conflict via two protomolecule-resurrected Laconians interfacing with an alien archive (which also gives a better sense of the history of the conflict between the protomolecule builders and their foes). This is all good stuff, though there is a nagging sense of it being a case of more tell than show.

Some of the weaknesses of earlier books remain - there are story beats in the finale here which feel pretty much just Xeroxed from earlier books, particularly Babylon's Ashes - but there is a melancholy air to the novel I wasn't quite expecting. The team have a new enemy, a ruthless Laconian soldier with kick-ass super armour given ill-advised total authority to deal with problems any way she sees fit, but even her heart doesn't seem to be entirely in it. The resistance is on the back foot and the Rocinante crew are struggling to hold it together, but similarly the Laconians are reeling from their own problems (particularly the losses of several of their most powerful warships) and aren't at their best. Both sides even spend some time wondering why they're shooting one another whilst the real enemies, the ultra-powerful extradimensional aliens, are trying to kill everyone.

The book does a solid job of wrapping up the character arcs for its major protagonists: Jim Holden's moral certainty, which both impresses and annoys, once again is put under the spotlight, whilst Naomi gets to lead the resistance. Amos, semi-hybridised with the protomolecule, is still pretty much Amos, whilst Alex gets a very low-key presence, despite his son playing a surprisingly important role through the book. We've spent nine books with this crew and the authors wisely choose to spend a fair amount of time on them doing what they do best: argue, roar across the Solar system getting into trouble, getting shot at, and playing an ace when least expected to win the day.

Other elements are less successful: new protagonist Aliana Tanaka has potential, but pulling a brand new antagonist out of nowhere in the last book of the series makes it very hard to invest much interest in her. She does have some intriguing characteristics, but it feels like the series might have been better to have set her up in an earlier volume, or had a more consistent set of enemies in the Laconian side of the story across the three books in which they are major players. 

The real question is does Leviathan Falls give us an ending worth more than a decade's build-up? The answer is a resounding and definitive, "kinda, yes". The authors have stumbled a bit in the past with lower-key finales to shorter story arcs, with both Nemesis Games and Persepolis Rising doing brilliant jobs of establishing new threats and enemies which then Babylon's Ashes and Tiamat's Wrath resolved rather hurriedly and perfunctory. Leviathan Falls does take another tack, building to an ending to the entire series which does feel somewhat familiar, but allows the characters to shine. There's a fair few unanswered questions here, which the epilogue (which jumps forwards a long time after the rest of the series) doesn't do much to address, but ultimately the novel rattles along and delivers a reasonably interesting ending, even if it's maybe not the one you were expecting.

Leviathan Falls (****) wraps up the Expanse series in a reflective mood. Never quite the decade-defining series it's sometimes been hailed as (and certainly not as important in SF literature as its TV counterpart is in SF TV), it's nevertheless delivered reliably entertaining space opera on a near-annual basis, and the ending certainly continues that fine tradition. I'll be interested to see what the authorial team can come up with next (though for Daniel Abraham, at least, that question will be answered by his new epic fantasy series which starts in a few weeks with Empire of Ash).

The Expanse: Season 6

The Solar system is reeling from the massive attacks unleashed on Earth and Mars by Marcos Inaros. With Earth still under threat, the UN fleet is unable to take the offensive, leaving it to rebel Belters led by Carmina Drummer and privateers like the Rocinante crew to keep Inaros on the defensive. Meanwhile, on the colony world of Laconia a bold renegade Martian admiral is tapping the planet's resources to build his own empire.

The Expanse has reliably been the best space opera TV show of the last decade, shading higher-profile but dumber fare like Star Trek: Discovery and Foundation with its excellent character development, outstanding visuals and strong writing. It has also, perhaps surprisingly, ended with only six of the nine novels in the series having been brought to the screen.

The reasons for ending the show here are persuasive: six seasons is a hell of a long time for any space opera TV show, two better than the much more heavily-feted Battlestar Galactica reboot, and only one less than three of the Star Treks. Going for another three might have been a bit too ambitious. In addition, there is a substantial time-skip in the books between the sixth and seventh volumes, which would require the TV show to put all the actors in aging makeup (always iffy) or recasting the whole cast (also dubious).

In that light you'd expect the producers to rewrite the ending of the sixth book, Babylon's Ashes, into an ending for the whole series. But they don't really do that either. The season adapts Babylon's Ashes with some fairly logical changes (substituting Drummer for Michio, as they did last season) and also some eyebrow-raising ones. The season brings in and adapts Strange Dogs, a self-contained novella exploring the initial colonisation of Laconia and the discover of its secrets there, as a prelude to the massive role Laconia plays in the closing three novels of the series. Adapting Strange Dogs with no guarantee that the setup will pay off later on is...bold, especially when this final season only has six episodes to work with rather than the more normal ten.

That said, giving Babylon's Ashes only six episodes to work with is a good idea: the novel is one of the weaker in the series, acting more as an extended coda to the epic events of Nemesis Games then a novel in its own right, with a huge number of POV characters meaning that its pacing was shot to hell and it felt like the final defeat of the bad guys was done way too easily. Season 6 of the show, on the other hand, mitigates almost all these problems. The pacing means the story is tighter and more focused; most of the other characters aren't even in the show so the focus can remain tight on the Roci family, Avasarala and Drummer; and the defeat of the bad guys is here complicated and given more weight. As usual, the CGI is exemplary, clearly showing what's going on (the current trend for murky, "arty" CG in space shows which just means you can't tell what's going on can go die in a fire) and delivering excellent space battles on a tight budget. The actors are all as great as we're used to, but I have to say that Cara Gee as Drummer really, really steps it up this season and goes above and beyond the call of duty, and gets almost all of the season's best moments.

There are a few other weaknesses: the devastation inflicted on Earth in the prior season seems to have been written off more quickly than even the book managed to do, and having major characters die off-screen always feels cheap. It might have been better to have just not mentioned such characters rather than do that. It's also a bit unclear how the Rocinante managed to overtake an enemy ship which had a massive head start on them in one chase. But these are fairly minor issues, some inherited from the source material.

The final (for now, maybe) season of The Expanse (****½) is the show doing what it's always done well: telling great character stories intermixed with politics and war, backed up by outstanding vfx and one of the best scores on television. The season's excellence is mitigated by the decision to continue doing setup work for future episodes that might never come, time that might have been better spent with our main characters. Still, if there's one thing you can't fault The Expanse for is its optimism and its willingness to take risks. The season and the entire series is available to watch worldwide on Amazon Prime Television.

Amazon announces release date and trailer for final season of THE EXPANSE

Amazon have dropped a trailer for the sixth and final season of The Expanse, which will begin airing on 8 December this year.

The sixth season of The Expanse draws on the sixth novel, Babylon's Ashes, as source material and sees the crew of the Rocinante joining forces with various factions to try to bring down Marco Inaros, still basking in the glow of his successful terror attacks on Earth in the previous season.

The TV version of The Expanse is ending early, with the final three novels in the series going un-adapted. It appears that the plan is to turn Babylon's Ashes into a conclusion for this version of the series, with a view to adapting the final three novels (Persepolis Rising, Tiamat's Wrath, Leviathan Falls) in a different format later on. The last three novels are set thirty years after the rest with a significantly different plot focus, which might be easier to handle as a spin-off series or series of TV movies.

The final novel in the Expanse book series, Leviathan Falls, will be released on 30 November this year.

James S.A. Corey joins THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS

Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham - better known as gestalt SF author James S.A. Corey - have agreed to contribute a story to the resurrected Last Dangerous Visions, an SFF anthology conceived by the late Harlan Ellison in the 1970s but not published in his lifetime.

Ellison passed away in 2018 but his legal executor J. Michael Straczynski has proceeded with plans to publish the collection, including updating it with new stories from some of modern SFF's big names, as well as a debut work by a new author. Neil Gaiman had also previously agreed to work on the project.

The plan is to submit a copy of the complete work - which will be substantial in size - to publishers by the end of May this year for publication.

The project has drawn a mixed reception from SFF fans and commentators, some noting relief that something will at least be salvaged from the long, long-gestating project, others feeling the project should have been left to die. Others continue to express scepticism the book will ever be published, despite Straczynski's considerably more reliable reputation compared to Ellison. People will be able to make up their own minds on the merits of the project when it does eventually hit the shelves.

The Expanse: Season 5

The crew of the Rocinante - in dry dock at Tycho Station for repairs - have split up: Amos is headed back to Earth to see to some outstanding business, whilst Alex is heading to Mars to see his family. Also on Mars is Bobbie Draper, who has uncovered a possible criminal conspiracy involving elements of the Martian military. Naomi has also left for Pallas, hoping to find her long-missing son. Former UN Secretary General Avasarala is on Luna, finding it hard to adapt to her new role away from the centre of government power. Drummer has found a new crew and a new family, but her old Belter loyalties are being tested. When a massive terrorist strike on an unprecedented scale takes place, the scattered crew of the Rocinante have to find their way back together across a Solar system suddenly plunged into war and fear.

Ever since the Expanse TV series launched in 2016, fans have been hoping it would make it as far as the events of the fifth novel in the series, Nemesis Games. Widely-regarded as the best book in the series, Nemesis Games manages both a large-scale, epic story combined with much more personal stories tightly focused on each of the crewmembers of the Rocinante. This allowed it to effectively cover a huge storyline from multiple vantage points located all around the Solar system.

The TV show, fortunately, more or less nails the landing. The first half of the season is tense and taut, delivering a countdown to Armageddon, exploring the event as it happens and then the immediate aftermath. All of the actors do good work, with Wes Chatham in particular turning in a great performance as Amos finds himself effectively the disaster relief coordinator for a small band of survivors of the disaster. The first half of the season is an unabashed triumph and might be the best run of episodes in the show's history.

The second half of the season is still good, but less effectively-paced. Having gotten the good stuff out of the way early on, the rest of the season feels locked into a holding pattern: Naomi is in a prison cell; Amos and his band of fellow survivors are trying to find a ship to escape; Bobbie and Alex are sitting in chairs on a spaceship; and Holden and a bunch of newer and older characters are sitting in chairs on their spaceship. Amos's storyline at least allows for more dynamic action and character interplay, even if the "will humanity hold together after an apocalypse or turn on one another?" question feels a bit redundant after decades of post-apocalyptic shows, books and movies, but everyone else is spinning in circles for much of the second half of the season.

Still, The Expanse is decent in its quieter moments as well as the loud ones and we get some good stuff here, particularly for Naomi as she has to embark on possibly the chanciest escape plan you'll ever see. Dominique Tipper gives a reliably outstanding performance as she has to guide Naomi through the toughest test she's ever faced, this time without the backup of her crew. Amos has his own mini-finale in the penultimate episode, including the show's most ambitious ground action sequence (which unfolds via what appears to be a single, long, continuous shot) to date, which is handled very well.

Things come together in the season finale, one of The Expanse's strongest episodes to date, setting things up for next year's final season. In fact, it's a bit bewildering that they're still following the books so closely (including material which is setup for Books 7-9, which are not being adapted in the show, or at least in this show) when it feels they should be closing things down for the final run of episodes.

Season 5 of The Expanse (****½) isn't quite the show at its best, but it's damn close. The flabby pacing at the end of the season is a problem which could have been resolved by bringing in more elements from the sixth book, Babylon's Ashes, but otherwise this is an outstanding season of television. The Expanse's position as the best space opera TV show currently airing remains unchallenged. The season is available to watch worldwide now on Amazon Prime Video.

Ty Frank rules out a James S.A. Corey-penned continuation of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

Over on Twitter, Ty Franck, one-half of gestalt SF author James S.A. Corey (the creative team behind The Expanse) alongside Daniel Abraham, has ruled himself out from being involved in a continuation or conclusion of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.

The news is not entirely a surprise: Franck and Abraham are close friends and collaborators with Martin on other projects, and Martin has made it clear over the years that he plans to complete A Song of Ice and Fire himself, come what may, so they are respecting his wishes. However, some fans have expressed some hopes that, should the concluding volumes of the series continue to frustrate Martin's creative juices in a timely manner, he might consider bringing in other people to at least help map out a plan for him to execute.

This kind of collaboration has become commonplace in modern fantasy. Brandon Sanderson, who is writing both his own huge fantasy series with The Stormlight Archive (four of ten planned books completed after a decade) and a much larger multiverse of interconnected series, has a huge array of beta and gamma readers who provide detailed feedback, as well as various experts in fields like geography, geology and military tactics, whom Sanderson can call on for advice as needed. The two authors of the Malazan series, Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont, can call upon one another for plot or character advice. Before he died, Wheel of Time author Robert Jordan had a number of fellow writers and assistants (including his wife Harriet, who was also his editor and an editor on other fantasy series like The Black Company) he could call on for assistance when stymied by a story point.

In fact, Martin has already collaborated with Daniel Abraham to some degree on A Song of Ice and Fire. In 2005, when the manuscript for the fourth book had ballooned out of control, it was Abraham who sat down with Martin, assessed the situation and recommended pulling the completed story arcs out of the manuscript to create a smaller fourth book focused on one geographical area. This led to the splitting of A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. Although not a universally satisfactory or popular decision, it did at least clear the logjam at that point and allowed the series to continue (although other logjams did emerge later on). In more recent years, Abraham has been working on the graphic novel adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire and has received some information from George about the planned ending to the books so he knows what novel stories he needs to follow closely and which can be jettisoned for clarity.

Martin himself has also reversed his once-firm stance that he would not create outlines to follow, feeling that they inhibit the spontaneity and invention of writing. In 2013 he sat down with Dan Weiss, David Benioff and Bryan Cogman to create an outline of the rest of the saga that could be used in crafting an ending to the TV show Game of Thrones (it remains unclear to what extent this outline was followed in crafting that ending, with Benioff and Weiss confirming a number of story points were 100% their invention whilst others came from Martin). Whilst that outline was oriented around the TV show (so probably doesn't address the facts of characters the show had already decided to ignore, like Arianne or Aegon the Maybe-Pretender or Jon Connington), it does mean that some forethought has gone into the ending.

Franck's statement indicates that at one point, he and Abraham would have considered working on such a project - only with Martin's express permission, approval and consent, obviously - but that has now past. 

GRRM's highly reasonable response to questions over his mortality.

Of course, the question has also arisen in the event that Martin suffers Early Existence Failure before the series ends. Martin considers - quite rightly - the question to be gauche and in bad taste. He has indicated that currently his estate is under firm instructions not to let anyone else finish the series, especially after seeing what happened to his friend Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber sequence when another writer decided to pen a subpar continuation of the series (not to mention the fate of Frank Herbert's Dune series, which some feel has been demeaned by the addition of poorly-conceived and badly-written prequels and sequels). He has, however, expressed admiration for the work of the late Christopher Tolkien, who spent many long years carefully presenting J.R.R. Tolkien's complete and incomplete manuscripts about Middle-earth, with editorial commentary.

Martin began writing A Song of Ice and Fire in the summer of 1991, publishing the first three volumes in relatively short order: A Game of Thrones in August 1996, A Clash of Kings in October 1998 and A Storm of Swords in August 2000. The pace of publication has since slowed, with A Feast for Crows following in 2005 and A Dance with Dragons in 2011. The sixth and penultimate volume, The Winds of Winter, is currently underway (and with recent positive and encouraging updates about progress) but with no release date set. Martin has also produced three novella prequels to the series: The Hedge Knight (1998), The Sworn Sword (2002) and The Mystery Knight (2010), and the novel-length history tome Fire and Blood (2018), as well as co-writing companion volume The World of Ice and Fire (2014).

The fifth season of the TV series based on James S.A. Corey's The Expanse is currently airing on Amazon Prime. The ninth and final novel, in the Expanse novel series, Leviathan Falls, is due out next year.

THE EXPANSE renewed for sixth and final season

Amazon Studios has renewed The Expanse for a sixth and final season, in a highly surprising move.

The Expanse aired for three seasons on SyFy before being cancelled by the network. The show's production company, Alcon, struck a deal with Amazon to pick up the show. The fourth season, which aired in December 2019, was the seventh-most-popular streaming show of 2019 according to some reports, behind Stranger Things, The Boys, The Crown and The Mandalorian, among others.

The fifth and now-penultimate season will start airing on 16 December this year. Season 6 will start shooting in January for a late 2021 or early 2022 debut.

The news will come as a shock to fans of the series. The novel series the TV show is based on consists of nine volumes, with Book 5 adapting the fifth volume, Nemesis Games, and the sixth likely to adapt Babylon's Ashes. The final three books - Persepolis Rising, Tiamat's Wrath and Leviathan Falls - will presumably not be adapted at all.

Alcon and Amazon's statements make it sound like the cancellation is pretty final, with no chance of moving to another network or streamer (to be fair, it's unclear if anyone else would be interested).

What will happen with the un-adapted books is unclear. There is a significant time jump between Babylon's Ashes and Persepolis Rising, leading to the possibility of the story being rounded off in TV movies or maybe a sequel mini-series at a later date, perhaps giving some time for the actors to age up a bit. Another possibility - compressing events of Books 6-9 into the final season - seems extremely unlikely given how much story and how many characters they'd have to go through.

Some previews for Season 5 suggest that the protomolecule/gate-builders storyline, which is pretty much benched in the fifth and sixth books, will continue to be a major subplot in the TV show, suggesting that perhaps that storyline will be brought up and moved to a conclusion in Season 6, so as not to leave any loose ends dangling.

Amazon and Alcon have also confirmed that castmember Cas Anvar, who plays Alex Kamal, will not return for the final season. Over the summer, sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against Anvar for his behaviour at a series of conventions several years before The Expanse began. The remaining cast and crew will return. It is not yet clear if the role of Alex will be recast or the character dropped between seasons.

Amazon releases trailer and airdate for Season 5 of THE EXPANSE

Amazon has released the trailer for Season 5 of the hit SF show The Expanse, as well as confirming its release date: 16 December. In a change from previous seasons, The Expanse will be released on a weekly schedule following the success of Amazon experimenting with the format for the second season of another of its shows, The Boys.

Season 5 of The Expanse is based primarily on the fifth book in the novel series, Nemesis Games, although it appears it will also draw on the novella The Churn. After Season 4, which was primarily restricted to one colony planet, Season 5 will again be an epic space opera spanning the Solar system, focusing on the criminal activities of Marcos Inaros as he strikes a blow against Earth and Mars which he hopes will win him the support of all the Belters. As usual, the crew of the Rocinante are called in to help save the day, but this time run into problems when the crisis erupts when they are on shore leave and scattered across several worlds, and they have to fight their way back home.

Production of Season 5 of The Expanse was completed a few weeks before the coronavirus pandemic shut down TV and movie productions worldwide. However, controversy struck the show in June when actor Cas Anvar (who plays pilot Alex Kamal) was accused of improper conduct by multiple women. The production team and studio have been investigating these claims ever since, but have not yet announced how they will proceed. However, Anvar has been notably absent from the publicity for the show ever since.

The ninth and final Expanse book, Leviathan Falls, will be published in 2021.

LEVIATHAN FALLS will be the final book of THE EXPANSE

Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham - the two halves of the gestalt author-entity known as James S.A. Corey - have confirmed that the ninth and final volume of The Expanse will hit bookshelves in 2021, ten years after the release of the first book in the series, Leviathan Wakes. Fittingly, the last book will be called Leviathan Falls.

The other books in the series are Caliban's War (2012), Abaddon's Gate (2013), Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), Babylon's Ashes (2016), Persepolis Rising (2017) and Tiamat's Wrath (2019). A series of short stories and novellas has also accompanied the main series. A further novella will be released alongside Leviathan Falls, with plans for a collection of all the novellas and short stories after the main series wraps. Their next project will be a trilogy, possibly a more distant-future, epic story in the vein of Dune.

In 2015 the books were adapted as a television series, The Expanse, initially on SyFy but now on Amazon Prime. The fifth season of the TV show, which wrapped production back in February, is expected to hit screens before the end of the year.

Production of THE EXPANSE impacted by misconduct allegations

The producers of The Expanse television series are dealing with a series of misconduct allegations against actor Cas Anvar, who plays Alex Kamal, the pilot of the Rocinante.

The allegations broke as part of a renewed discussion of misconduct related to the video games industry; the specific allegations against Anvar relate to his time in video game fandom and attending conventions following his appearance in Assassin's Creed: Revelations (2011), voicing the character of Altair. Anvar is reported to have made unwanted advances towards multiple female cosplayers and convention attendees.

Anvar has so far made no response to the specific allegations. The co-creators of The Expanse confirmed they are taking the allegations seriously and will be working with Amazon Television to do their due diligence and decide on what action to take moving forwards.

Season 5 of The Expanse had been completed before the COVID-19 pandemic began and is currently scheduled to air on Amazon Prime later this year. If Anvar was to leave the show, it would presumably have to take place before production of Season 6 began. It should be noted this is very much a minor concern when ranged against the extremely large number of allegations raised against the actor by multiple people, and the seriousness of them.

Over the weekend, similar allegations were also made against Chris Avellone, arguably one of the most famous writers in video games (having worked on titles including Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout 2, Fallout: New Vegas and Planescape: Torment, amongst others). In Avellone's case he immediately apologised to several of the women involved. His recent work for several companies is now under review, and in some cases has been terminated.

Tiamat's Wrath by James S.A. Corey

The Laconian Empire has conquered the Solar system and most of the colony worlds established through the ring space. A resistance movement led by the crewmembers of the Rocinante is hoping to win back the freedom of the individual worlds, but High Consul Winston Duarte has taken James Holden captive. As tensions rise, Duarte makes the bold decision to declare war on the unknown, possibly unknowable aliens that killed the creators of the protomolecule, a war that will have unforeseen consequences.

Tiamat's Wrath is the eighth and penultimate novel in The Expanse, moving the series decisively towards its endgame with the conflict against the unknown aliens beginning in force. This is the moment that The Expanse has been building towards for a decade, with the true conflict finally getting underway.

It's a shame, then, that it feels anti-climactic. Part of the problem in this latter part of the series is that it feels like it is trying to do too much in too little space: the conquest of the Solar system by the Laconians happened very rapidly (and mostly off-screen) in the previous book and in this book the resistance movement forms and takes action with almost indecent haste. Persepolis Rising did at least benefit from the tight focus on the Rocinante crew trying to escape Medina Station and using that as a lens through which other events unfolded. Tiamat's Wrath is a much more epic, widescreen book which tries to tell the story across a number of fast-moving fronts, but in almost exactly the same page count. This results in a much faster-paced story where events happen quickly and sometimes without enough setup.

We've been here before, and in fact Tiamat's Wrath forms the second half of a duology that began with Persepolis Rising, and in doing so comes across as a near beat-for-beat retread of the previous duology (Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes): in the first book a huge, epic, game-changing event takes place with apparently massive ramifications for the series, and in the second it is wrapped up with almost indecent haste, both times relying on an important female character in the enemy camp deciding to swap sides. The structural similarities between the two duologies can leave the reader with a nagging sense of deja vu. The pieces are different but the game is being played the same way.

There is also the problem that we still know very little about the extradimensional alien threat. We know they're bad news, but their motivations, capabilities and real level of threat remain unclear after eight books out of nine in the series. It does feel a little like the situation with the Others in A Song of Ice and Fire, where we're supposed to be wary of this species but we don't really know what they want so it means their level of threat remains vague. The stakes, rather than being made clear or raised, are instead simply left undefined.

As usual, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who together make up the gestalt entity known as James S.A. Corey) deliver a fast-paced, moderately well-written space opera yarn with some exciting battles, interesting plot twists and some decent characterisation, but also one that feels like it is repeating earlier beats from the series and still leaving a lot of information undisclosed before heading into the final volume of the series. Tiamat's Wrath (***) is solid but occasionally feels like a detailed plot summary of a novel rather than a novel in its own right. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey

Over the last thirty years, Earth, Mars and the Belt have unified to explore and settle the thirteen hundred colony worlds beyond the ring gates. The divisions and damage of previous generations are slowly being forgotten...until the colony world of Laconia launches a coup using protomolecule-based technology. As a new empire rises, the crew of the ageing frigate Rocinante once again find themselves on the front lines.

Persepolis Rising, the seventh book in The Expanse, opens with a bit of a non-sequitur time jump as we leap thirty years after the events of Babylon's Ashes. This is an interesting narrative decision, although one that is decidedly undersold: everyone is pretty much exactly where we left them in the previous volume and doing much the same thing, which not so much stretches credulity as shatters it into ten thousand tiny pieces. Time jumps are tricky to get right and can often feel contrived, and the time jump in this book feels rather like the latter.

Once the initial discomfort of that passes, Persepolis Rising ups its game considerably by introducing the Laconian forces as a powerful new player on the scene. There was enough foreshadowing in the previous two books to allow Laconia's rise to feel reasonably organic and the authors do a good job of fleshing out the empire and its hierarchy by using Laconian military officer Santiago Singh as a POV character. There's also some good characterisation as Singh makes choices that seem reasonably logical in isolation but rapidly escalate towards disaster.

Elsewhere, the Rocinante crew get stuck in a very tricky situation and have to escape. This is a fairly good story, but it feels like it should have been a much briefer episode in a larger story. Instead, huge events are happening but then we cut back to our regular heroes plotting to escape...and then plotting some more...and then at the end of the novel they (spoilers!) escape. The main storyline here is treading a bit too much water.

Still, there's some very good characterisation and the authors pull off a major shift in the underlying paradigm of the series relatively successfully. Persepolis Rising (****) is available now in the UK and USA.

Babylon's Ashes by James S.A. Corey

The Solar system has been plunged into chaos. A third of the Martian fleet has defected to a new cause, an OPA breakaway faction has committed the greatest terrorist attack in human history and the new colony worlds beyond the gateways are engulfed in strife. It once again falls on the shoulders of Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante to help end the crisis.

Babylon's Ashes is the sixth novel (of nine) in The Expanse series, but is really the second half of the preceding novel, Nemesis Games, which took the Expanse universe we'd all grown to know and tossed it through a blender. Ashes picks up the wreckage from that book and tries to restore some sense of normalcy to the setting.

The book is huge in scope. In fact, it's the broadest in scale of the series to date, with numerous POV characters in multiple factions, including picking up on various one-off POVs who appeared in earlier novels. Seeing characters like Prax and Anna show up again several volumes after their own storylines apparently ended and lend a hand (or take a view) on what's going on is quite good fun.

However, since Babylon's Ashes is pretty much exactly the same length as the other books in the series, this enlarged scope does mean we get a lot less time with other characters. In fact, the book's pace feels a bit accelerated, as we pin-pong back and forth between a large cast. Having more characters in a standard-sized book means that we spend less time with each character, and the resulting story arcs are much choppier.

It also doesn't help that there is a repetition of structure and plot here. We've seen Jim Holden and the team getting into hijinks with the Nauvoo aka Behemoth aka Medina Station and the "slow zone" previously whilst various other factions shoot at one another and here we are, doing it again.

The Expanse is, at its best, a thrillingly executed political thriller in space, with normally enjoyable adventure elements added. At its worst, the series' workmanlike prose and tight focus can leave it feeling repetitive and a bit MOR as these kind of space operas go. Nemesis Games was probably the best book in the series because it gave readers a "Red Wedding" level of shock, something which overthrew the apple carts and put our heroes on the back foot with a genuinely thrilling sense that anything could happen. Babylon's Ashes wastes that promise by lowballing the damage done from the disaster in the previous novel (the characters are now completely removed from the carnage so it's only related through statistics and people looking glumly at reports on screens), eliminating the over-arcing threat easily with a convenient mcguffin and then establishing a new status quo with almost indecent haste.

That's not to say that Babylon's Ashes is a bad book. Even at its weakest, The Expanse is competent. But there is the prevailing feeling here that the books feel like a first draft with the (decidedly superior) TV adaptation coming in afterwards and rearranging the character and plot elements into something considerably more compelling.

Babylon's Ashes (***) is readable and interesting, but after Nemesis Games it feels decidedly underwhelming, occasionally bordering on the lacklustre. It is available now in the UK and USA.

The Expanse: Season 4

Billions of years ago a war raged between two races whose powers and abilities far outstrip those of humanity. One of those races sent a semi-intelligent compound known as the protomolecule to the Solar system with the intent of building an immense gateway, leading to more than a thousand other worlds orbiting other stars. The Sol gateway is now complete, sparking a gold rush as refugees and prospectors flee to the new worlds. The first world to be so settled is Ilus, now a potential flashpoint between Belter refugees and Terran corporate interests. UN Secretary General Avasarala sends James Holden and the Rocinante to mediate...at the same time an OPA breakaway faction is making a move of its own in the Belt and on Mars.

The Expanse is the best space opera TV series of modern times, maybe the finest since the 1990s genre heyday of Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1 and Farscape. For three seasons, SyFy crafted a remarkable, entertaining slice of drama which can happily stand alongside any terrestrial-set "Golden Age" show. Then they cancelled it.

Fortunately, the richest man in the world turned out to be a huge fan of the series and was able to save it, with at least a further two seasons due to air on Amazon (Season 5, shooting at the moment, will air next year).

Season 4 of The Expanse is based on the fourth book in the novel series, Cibola Burn. Readers of the books will know that this story is the most static of the series, with the action being almost entirely restricted to one planet. To mix things up, the TV show also adapts the novella Gods of Risk, focusing on Bobbie on Mars, and adds some new storylines focused on Drummer and Ashford tracking down breakaway terrorist Marco Inaros (setting up the fifth season) and Avasarala seeking re-election as UN Secretary-General.

This addition of new storylines and a slightly reduced episode count (10 rather than 13) gives the series both a good sense of pacing and maintains the epic, solar system-spanning feel of the earlier seasons whilst also staying true to the books. The focus is firmly on events on Ilus, however, which gives the show a new feeling: open skies above our characters' heads, strange alien ruins to investigate (which occasionally makes things feel a bit like the movie Arrival) but still a lot of cynical politics to navigate.

This gives us the best new character of the season, Adolphus Murtry, played by Burn Gorman (Pacific Rim, Game of Thrones, Torchwood). Murtry is much more of an obvious villain in the book, but here gains slightly more nuance (pitting him as the mirror image of Amos). Gorman's performance is typically strong, being both charismatic and morally repugnant. Other strong new performers include Lyndie Greenwood as Dr. Elvi Okoye, Rosa Gilmore as Lucia Mazur and Keon Alexander as Marco Inaros, the latter of whom will play a crucial role in the next season or two and is suitably, sleazily charismatic.

The writing and performances are strong, and the visuals much improved by Amazon's higher budget. Many of the shots in this season feel like they're straight out of a much bigger-budget feature film. The show also continues its much greater focus (than most space operas) on realistic physics, such as a tense scene where one ship has to tow another to a higher orbit and another where the characters have to brace themselves for geological disturbances on the planet and the resulting tsunami.

The season does have a few weaknesses. The source material is probably the weakest book in the series (although still a pretty solid book) and the TV show can't quite overcome the fact that events are constrained to one setting. After seeing the much busier Abaddon's Gate adapted in just seven episodes in Season 3, it feels like giving ten episodes to Cibola Burn was a bit generous, even with the other storylines added to bulk things out. The pacing is therefore not quite as gripping in previous seasons. Another issue - one more for book readers than viewers - is that the show decides to spell out Marco Inaros' masterplan in the closing moments of the series. Given that the events alluded to are essentially The Expanse's "Red Wedding" moment, more effective when shocking, spoiling this ahead of time is a questionable move. We'll have to wait until next year to see if this move pays off in Season 5.

Despite some minor quibbles, the fourth season of The Expanse (****½) remains an excellent show with fine performances, great scripts and impressive effects. The move to Amazon hasn't hurt the show at all and whets the appetite for what will be possible next year. The season is available to watch now in the UK and USA.

Season 4 of THE EXPANSE hits Amazon

Season 4 of The Expanse, almost certainly the best TV show on air right now, has arrived on Amazon Prime today (UK, USA).

Adapting the events of the fourth novel in the series, Cibola Burn, the book sees the Rocinante crew dispatched to deal with problems on a newly-settled colony planet beyond the Ring Gateway established at the end of Season 3.

Season 5 of The Expanse is already shooting for a mid-to-late 2020 debut.

Pre-production begins on Season 5 of THE EXPANSE

Pre-production is well underway on Season 5 of The Expanse, with the cast and crew gathering today for the table-read of the season. Actual shooting should start in the next week or so.

Season 4 of the show hasn't even aired yet, but Amazon renewed the show for a fifth season several months ago as part of a new policy meant to reduce the ever-widening gaps between seasons of premium TV. Shows like Game of Thrones, Westworld and Stranger Things have seen gaps of eighteen months up to two years between their last few respective seasons, a result of the need to see viewing figures, then shoot the series and then undertake the increasingly elaborate post-production work needed for these shows to look as good as they do. Amazon's new policy saw them greenlight a second season of The Boys before the first had aired, and there are signs that they will do the same thing for Wheel of Time and Lord of the Rings: The Second Age, now both in production in eastern Europe and New Zealand respectively.

Season 5 of The Expanse is expected to draw heavily on the fifth and sixth books in the series, Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes, and will air in late 2020.

Seasons 1-3 of The Expanse are airing now worldwide on Amazon Prime Video now. Season 4 will be released on 13 December 2019.

THE EXPANSE renewed for fifth season at Amazon

In an impressive display of confidence, Amazon has renewed The Expanse for a fifth season, despite Season 4 not being due to air for another five months.

The first three seasons of The Expanse were produced by Alcon Entertainment for SyFy, but SyFy cancelled the show after the third season due to low ratings and high costs, despite the show delivering blanket critical acclaim and giving the network its biggest critical hit since Battlestar Galactica ended a decade ago.

The series was revived on Amazon after negotiations, during which it was revealed that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was a huge fan of both the TV series and the original books written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (under the pen name "James S.A. Corey").

The early renewal appears to be down to the show's production requirements, with cast and crew already ready to roll on the next season, and the desire to limit the gaps between seasons. This move should allow Season 5 to air a year or maybe even less after Season 4.

Season 4 of The Expanse is due to hit Amazon Prime on 13 December 2019.

THE EXPANSE Season 4 gets trailer, clip and airdate

Amazon have released the first trailer and a full clip from Season 4 of The Expanse, and confirmed that the season will hit the streaming service on 13 December.

The fourth season will consist of ten episodes and will draw primarily upon the fourth novel in the book series, Cibola Burn, although elements from the fifth book (Nemesis Games) are also expected to be included. Alongside the returning cast from the previous season, the show is adding Burn Gorman (Torchwood, Game of Thrones, Pacific Rim) as a recurring antagonist character.

The Expanse ran for three critically-acclaimed seasons on SyFy before being cancelled due to the show's expense and declining viewing figures (not helped by SyFy's near absent marketing for the show). Amazon stepped in and saved the show after it was revealed that company CEO Jeff Bezos is a huge fan of the books and the TV series.

The Expanse: Season 3

The Solar system is on the brink of war, with the numerically superior forces of the UN-controlled Earth and the technologically superior forces of the Martian Congressional Republic poised to unleash their ships and weapons. The crew of the starship Rocinante race to Io to expose the protomolecule conspiracy which has brought the Solar system to the brink, but face serious opposition. Meanwhile, the protomolecule fragment that landed on Venus has not been idle, and beneath the impenetrable clouds of the planet something is taking shape.

The first season of The Expanse was good. The second season was superb, the best season of space opera television since (at least) the second season of the newer Battlestar Galactica. The series, based on the novels by James S.A. Corey (aka Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), paints a picture of a near-future Solar system riven by competing corporate interests, political tension and the dangers of unrestrained technological development. As well as the compelling main storyline, a host of finely-judged character arcs unfold, with the whole thing hinging on a (relatively) realistic depiction of Newtonian physics and space travel.

Season 3 continues in this vein. It is divided into two strands. The first six episodes round off the events of Caliban's War, the second novel in the series, and focus on the political showdown between Earth and Mars, which goes further than it does in the book. The latter seven episodes have the steep challenge of adapting the third novel in the series, Abaddon's Gate, in full. This breaks up the season quite nicely, with the first half being more of a political and war story and the second being more of a hard SF mystery, complete with multiple Big Dumb Objects to investigate and some excellent use of the laws of physics to provide obstacles to the characters.

There are also new characters this season, particularly Anna Volovodov, played with aplomb by genre veteran Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost), and the highly morally ambiguous character of Klaes Ashford, played with charisma by David Strathairn (Lincoln). Both are excellent additions to the cast. There is also a significantly expanded role for fan-favourite character Drummer, played by Cara Gee, a recognition of her superb performance.

On a thematic level, the show continues to contrast politics, science, war, expediency and ideology as clashing ideals, with even Holden's idealism and desire to "do the right thing" being scrutinised as not always possible (or even logical). Sometimes the good guys do bad things for the greater good (summed up by Amos's chilling, "I am that guy," in possibly the season's best single scene), sometimes people make what appears to be perfectly reasonable decisions which have horrendous consequences (the look on Errinwright's face when Earth's defensive railguns fail to shoot down a Martian nuke is priceless, and horrific) and life is messy and chaotic, with arguing over the way forwards. If anything, the show makes a case (through Avasarala) for political compromise and negotiation, no matter how boring, as it is preferable to people dying as a result of nationalist propaganda. There's a powerful message of hope in The Expanse which sometimes wins out over the cynical, morally murky manoeuvrings elsewhere in the story.

There's also the idea of the mystery, with the protomolecule and its later creation, the Ring, being the implacable Unknown which humanity is struggling to understand, and only doing so imperfectly and through its own morass of selfish, competing viewpoints. The Unknown hits back several times, reminding humanity of just how tiny and insignificant they are in the universe, something which gains added traction in the cliffhanger, which seems to be going for Arthur C. Clarke levels of awe and wonder.

Season 3 of The Expanse (*****) continues the show's streak of being the best SF series on air this decade, with outstanding production values, pacing, effects and acting. It is available to watch now on Amazon Prime (UK, USA). Filming for Season 4 is already complete and should air later this year, also on Amazon Prime.