I love the fact that they goofed the physics involving a wrench in one of the earlier episodes, so they got help fact checking the physics for future shows and the wrench has been included as an easter egg / running joke to remind them to strive for realism.
There is a scene in one of the later seasons where a character pours whiskey into glasses on the moon, and it's very much obscured and in the background, and they _still_ made sure that the liquid pours out more slowly and splashes up much higher than it would normally. Honestly some of the best attention to detail in sci-fi I've ever seen.
Check out the audio books. The narrator, Jefferson Mays, does a masterful job at patois/Belter-speak, along with all the other character for that matter.
I suspect the Expanse series used his work as inspiration, since the patois is virtually identical on the show. Mays is in a league of his own. [0]
I really like the vocabulary and use of words, such as "tight beam", "space him" and others. I think it's a very creative show and one of my favorites at this point. I enjoy the sound track too.
Not to burst your bubble, but "tightbeam" and "space" (as a verb meaning "to kill by exposure to the vacuum of space") are both quite common and old usages in science fiction -- they aren't unique to The Expanse.
"Tightbeam" was in use as early as the 1930s, by E. E. Smith. Interestingly, this means the term was coined before lasers were even invented! https://sfdictionary.com/view/1943/tight-beam
Agree! My wife stumbled across The Expanse soon after we finished watching all 7 seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and couldn't bear the thought of sitting through Voyager or Enterprise.
The Expanse's culture (language, slingshot gravity-racer livestream stars, class relations, etc.) feel so plausible. And the character relationships are deeply nuanced - like how even though Ashford was always challenging Drummer's control of The Behemoth, they showed genuine mutual respect, even love, for one another when it mattered.
She’s certainly the character that I think they got the most wrong. Besides the general mannerisms, the fact that she’s all for torture and misc other shitty behavior feels completely off to me.
What do you mean by "most wrong?" Compared to her character in the book, or the character you'd like her to be instead?
I think Avasarala is actually one of the better written characters. As far as character development goes, she has one of the best arcs in the whole series. In the beginning, she is a politician and power broker who takes zero shit from anybody, especially the men who are supposed to be her superiors. Various tragedies like the Earth nearly getting wiped out nearly turn her into a bloodthirsty Belter-killing monster. She eventually softens substantially and only wants to do what's best for the human race as a whole. (But still taking shit from no one.) That she is an older Indian woman whose language would make a lumberjack blush is just an interesting twist.
One of the central themes of the Expanse (the books and the show) is that unlike most plots in books or movies, there are no good guys here. There are only people who are driven by some greater purpose (greed, power, loyalty to government, justice, etc). They do good things, they do bad things, they do stupid things. They are complicated, just like real people.
As an example, the characters that we might try to think of as the "good guys" are the crew of the Roci. Holden is a navel-gazing military wash-out who nearly starts an interplanetary war between Earth and Mars via pure speculation. And NEVER apologizes for it. Amos' background isn't explored in much detail in the show, but in the books he worked for a brutal crime boss on Earth and more or less just kills whoever gets in his way or because he thought they might. Alex was an absentee father and husband. Naomi abandoned her young child. And ALL of them stole their ship from the people of Mars. (They use the euphemism "Legitimate Salvage" in sorry-but-not-sorry kind of way.)
Finally, context is important. In the future of The Expanse, human civilization is pretty much A Fucking Mess. The Earth is overcrowded, half the population is on welfare, and crime is rampant. Mars is effectively a military state. In the Belt, you are as likely to die from a random equipment malfunction as saying the wrong thing in a bar. So a lot of parallels with countries in present-day Earth, just amplified.
Anywho, I don't agree with torture either, but it's hardly a surprise that it happens in that universe.
I love how you point out that the characters are all believable, flawed people. I love Avasarala's character (and the actress' voice on top of that is like icing on a cake), and the way she plays the Power game so well. I really dislike that her character would torture, but at the same time she's like a well-written villain. She doesn't quite fit on an alignment chart.
> ALL of them stole their ship from the people of Mars
I'm not sure how it is in the book, but in the TV show, a ranking officer of the Martian navy explicitly tells the ship that they are in control. As legitimate salvage goes, it seems pretty defensible. The only reason they don't go deeper into it seems, to me, to be because explaining that (and proving it) would be Very Hard, and they'd rather avoid the risk.
> a ranking officer of the Martian navy explicitly tells the ship that they are in control.
Yes, that's how they got possession of it and managed to make use of it. It is not at all the same thing as relinquishing ownership, which that Martian officer would not be able to do in any case because he didn't own the ship. The reasonable expectation is that they use the ship to do the job they needed it for, and then return it to it's proper owners.
This is, of course, only the second worst case of piracy thinly disguised as salvage in the Expanse. The title for the worst case of course goes for Behemoth.
I mean "the most wrong" as in that the TV version of her does not really fit into the general setting and story of the books, IMHO. She's really central to much of the story, but to me the TV version of her feels way to generic and Americanised.
Honestly, the only thing that I felt as being off was how they portrayed Earth as being overpopulated. If there were multiple planets/settlements to move to, and an increased overall HDI, you would expect there to be less people on Earth just due to shifting demographic trends. But, other than that it seems really realistic.
> I stopped watching it though once the "protomolecule" stuff started.
So, the first scene in the first episode? Before the opening credits?
It would be one thing if they added the crazy alien magic plot device midway through a later season to get out of some writing hole they'd gotten themselves into, but they intentionally opened the first episode of the show (and the prologue of the first book) with a fleeting glimpse of what the protomolecule is capable of to set the stakes for the rest of the series.
The protomolecule is pretty much super advanced tech from a civilisation that had a billion year or so headstart. For me, a big part of the show is about how technology changes us and the protomolecule is an extreme example of that.
Its not backed up by science and thats not the point. The point is how humans react to it and how the story progresses after that is really great, one of the best series overall i've ever watched.
> a big part of the show is about how technology changes us
I've always thought that movie/series genre are just a facade for the real genre:
- Slasher movies are supposedly about the boogey man/monster killing protagonist, but it's really about how humans interact when put under stress and show their true color
- (Heroic) Fantasy movies are supposedly about wizards and knights and witches, but it's really just a huge politics playground
- Science fiction movies are supposedly about new technology/aliens/space stuff, but it's really about how something outside of our knowledge changes us, challenges our values, and reveals who we are. That's usually technology but can be anything.
It's of course not just that, there are always exceptions, and I'm probably not the first one to have this view. But I think this is the reason I like almost anything sci-fi but can barely stand watching fantasy movies: I can't find myself to care about people fighting each other for a little bit more power.
The hard sci-fi background makes the protomolecule stuff quite good actually IMHO.
Since they are not goofing off in basic things and they've done their homework, having space magic happen is much more entertaining than in e.g. Star Trek where basically everything is driven by plot-based technobabble so you really have no distinction between "standard technology" and "unfathomable space phenomena of the week".
Some of the space magic driven by protomolecule later on is fairly thoughtfull IMO and meshes nicely with rest of the show. I would advice you to continue watching - the series gets constantly better and better.
I was also put off by it, but it does end up going in a nice pseudo-hard scifi direction once you get to the end of season 3. It respects the physical limitations of human technology while providing a pretty neat what-if.
I was also ok with the Epstein drive. It's a nice little plot enabler. "Yeah, space colonization is laughably implausible, but what if we had just this one piece of magic technology?"
That's a fun read! I've heard of nuclear pulse propulsion, but never considered railgun fuel injected, laser-ignited, magnetically focused fusion a kilometer from the ship as a means of propulsion. Indeed that also looks like quite a weapon.
The protomolecule stuff drives the plot of the entire story. It's why the conflict happens, and how the characters end up in the middle of it, from the very first episode. And it keeps building on that all the way through the show and the books. The focus remains on humanity, but the alien stuff provides the motivation for the ongoing human response.
Also, advanced alien tech in pretty much all science fiction follows Arthur C. Clarke's dictum about magic. Of course they're going to be able to do things humans don't understand. Do you really think we would be able to explain everything a billion+ year old civilization could do?
The human stuff is hard sci-fi. The alien protomolecule is thoroughly in the realm of sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic.
And I'm fine with that because of how its handled. The protomolecule is less of a technology itself and more or a narrative tool. How it works isn't important. What is important is that it is a disruptive force that changes the direction of humanity.
It is 'magic' but a really interesting concept. It's essentially a self-replicating terraforming device. An ancient civilization sends out probes with the molecule - in this case a small planetoid - that will hopefully crash into a planet with biological material and then collect and convert said material into a ring that connects to an interstellar network. The problem is that the one in The Expanse got caught up in Jovian system, like gets done with a lot of interstellar objects.
It's a variation on the Von Neumann probe. A self replicating spacecraft. Instead of being for exploration or production of a specific widget its purpose is building ftl gates as part of a presumably galactic network.
Proto is latin for primitive and/or precursor. Protomolecule also sounds like something a scientist would come up with if they were trying to expand their research funding and had a fickle investor (i.e. Mao).
So while protomolecule sound like something out of the Power Rangers, it's an oddly plausible term.
From Proteus, a Greek god of rivers and water known for changing his shape and nature to suite the situation. That description suites the Protomolecule.
When I tried reading the novels I had a problem there because I thought the books were putting forth explanations for it that didn't make sense. But the TV show didn't try to explain beyond something like "magic future technology" and I don't have any problem suspending disbelief for that.
In my opinion they get one "pass". Science fiction is best when you have one thing changed in the world and ask the question "How does this world behave?". OK, so the Expanse changes 2 things. Constant acceleration is possible, protomolecule is a thing.
Atomic rockets did some math on the Epstein drive and it's theoretically possible, though well outside known engineering. It's supposed to have an exhaust velocity of .036 c and the theoretical max for fusion drives is well above that.
Besides that I think most of the plot wouldn't be all that different with slower drives, there'd just be longer stretches of nothing happening and more spinning stuff.
The whole point of the entire series is that the protomolecule is an unknown quantity. They don't know (exactly) where it came from, how it works, what it's for. Only that it is extremely dangerous. And then plots are built around that. If they knew (and explained) how it worked, then all their problems would be solved and the show would end.
AFAIK nothing there violates known laws of physics or mathematics. Very far fetched? Yes. Impossible? Maybe, maybe not. Keep in mind that the protomolecule is apparently the work of alien intelligences considerably beyond our intellectual capacity and far older.
That kind of thing doesn't bother me. I don't think a dog could even comprehend a wheel. Even within the same species, major advances can look like magic to earlier generations. A top-tier scientist from the 19th century may well have pronounced just about all of today's digital devices impossible science fiction. "Billions of calculations per second in something in your pocket that runs on a battery you can recharge?" Lots of stretches there for a scientist from 1820. There are still people (who are not stupid) who don't believe we went to the moon.
Hard sci-fi just means a story that doesn't instantly fail undergrad physics and whose speculative physics are credible enough that a typical physicist won't roll their eyes.
Wormholes and warp drive, for example, have not been conclusively ruled out. Most physicists doubt you could build them in the foreseeable future (or maybe ever), but nobody's shown a reason they would "break physics."
Faster than light motion or reactionless drives that generate conventional momentum are however believed to be impossible.
It leads to some counterintuitive stuff. Giant massive ships that silently hover in the sky without blowtorching whatever is beneath them are strongly believed to be less plausible than something superficially more far fetched like the Alcubierre Drive. That's because reactionless drives that create conventional momentum "break physics," while so far we have not been able to rule out altering space-time curvature. If I were writing a hard sci-fi story with an Alcubierre Drive in it, I'd still have the astronauts going up to their warp ship in chemical rockets. I'd also have my warp ship using chemical or ion propulsion to move around when not using its warp drive, and the thing would have to have massive heat sinks that would glow red hot when warp is powering up to discharge all the power plant's waste heat (second law of thermodynamics).
Credible speculation in physics usually means that there exist mathematical solutions or models that suggest the possibility of something, but where we do not yet currently know if that math is "real" let alone "engineerable." There may also be things that are technically possible but that are so hard to do that they recede behind a kind of "probability horizon," becoming effectively impossible. An example might be a warp drive that requires so much energy and is so hard to build and control that the probability of someone doing it anywhere in the universe between now and heat death is near zero even if you assume that intelligent life is common.
> A top-tier scientist from the 19th century may well have pronounced just about all of today's digital devices impossible science fiction. "Billions of calculations per second in something in your pocket that runs on a battery?"
Heck, actual science fiction authors in the mid-20th century got that wrong. Asimov, for example, while he had autonomous robots walking around, limited mobile computing devices (installed in anything smaller than a spaceship) to calculators and dumb terminals. Output was often limited to ALL CAPS printed on a slip or strip of paper (again, despite robots able to communicate verbally).
OTOH, Asimov definitely got the importance of miniaturization right in that series, though he mostly applies it to things like force fields and the like, rather than computing devices (other than the tools psychohistorians use).
BTW, you may enjoy Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis. Well worth reading, it adds quite a few interesting and plausible embellishments to Asimov's conceptual framework.
One fictional world that got that right is the Classic Battletech universe.
The two things out our world are a FTL jump drive (the Kearny-Fuchida drive only working at gravitational balance points) and the hyper pulse generators (sending FTL messages using the same physics). Everything else is well within established physics. Fusion engines? Check. Laser and direct energy weapons? Check. 12m high walking robots? Sure, why not. All beyond current engineering, but not beyond physics.
Even space travel is using reaction drives (fusion powered ones, but everything space born needs fuel to move) with acceleration well below 10g. And even the space-based tabletop uses acceleration and vectors instead of speed. A bitch to track on paper so.
The absolute hardest sci-fi I've ever seen is probably near-term cyberpunk or stuff like The Martian. That stuff is pretty rare. Even most "hard" sci-fi requires some suspension of disbelief. The difference between hard and soft is whether one must go entirely into the realm of fantasy to suspend that disbelief, or whether it just requires the assumption of non-linear advances in technology or superhuman intellect.
The Martian's take on potatoes is not very hard at all. Not only is Martian soil loaded with percholrates, it would have taken far longer than shown to prime the soil with enough microbes to support the growth of so many potatoes.
Is The Expanse really Hard Sci-Fi? I get that the space flight physics and tech involved could be considered hard Sci-fi. But in later books and show season - the whole gate network is quite a bit handwavy.
IMHO “hard” SF is more about feeling “accurate” than actually being accurate - more lip service is paid to something resembling physics as we currently understand it. And the #1 thing for someone to say “fuck it, I’m cutting a hole in existing physics in the interest of telling a compelling story” for is probably “moving shit between planets/stars faster than orbital mechanics and the speed of light allows”.
This is relatively true. spoiler alert Does not hold for the alien technology, which isn't explained well at all (proto molecule, gates, slow zone, etc)
The characters don't understand how it works, which is a key part of the main storyline.
spoiler alert
The books are a couple seasons ahead of the show, and this becomes and even more prominent plot point.
It's internally consistent so far, which is more important IMHO. What I mean by this is there's definitely things that are effectively "magic" to us, but not in the way lazy story writers use it (think ST:TNG where they just invent some technobabble that solves the problem in the last 5 mins of the episode).
I particularly liked where Detective Miller explains to Holden why he can see him, effectively saying something like "there's a few billion neurons in the human brain, like a massive keyboard - we just have to push the right combination of buttons"
Usually I consider internal inconsistencies and the resulting deus-ex machina moments as lazy writing, at best. What Star Trek achieved, especially TNG and VOY, was creating a completely consistent universe by using techno babble just this side of "realistic" that allowed them to get away with their other stories. Some of which are really great. Still, since the Expense came out I think it shows how un scientific Star Trek is.
I liked the hard sci-fi elements in The Expanse, but the idea of people mining asteroids in poor third world-like conditions makes absolutely no sense to me. Or an evil megacorp that murders millions of people with no adequate explanation. Couldn't get past the first book.
We have people right here on earth mining in actual third-world countries. It's not hard to imagine that phenomenon being exported to asteroid mining. In fact, it seems quite likely.
I dunno, Musk has already indicated he'd put people in feudal serfdom to pay off a loan if they want a trip to Mars. And he'd get people volunteering for it.
Do you have a better citation? Because loans are not feudalism — and if you want to insist they are, only Islamic Law jurisdictions (which bans interest rather than loans but eh) are non-feudal.
Loans in themselves are not 100% "feudal", though I don't think it's a binary "is feudal" -vs- "is not feudal"; more of a "how feudal". The implication above was that loan repayment via mandatory labour is feudal (or at least "more feudal").
> if you want to insist they are, only Islamic Law jurisdictions (which bans interest rather than loans but eh) are non-feudal
That's a pretty big "eh" tbh; I don't many people think interest is the problematic part of loans. Don't think Islamic Law can be excluded here.
It's all speculation of course, but "with loans available" sounds like it's SpaceX that will offer the loans. And how can you repay them after arrival, apart from working on a colony designed and controlled by SpaceX? This basically smells of "we'll offer you cheap food and tools at the company store".
Does the colony itself have to be owned by the transport company?
At Musk’s target price for Mars flights, someone as rich as Bezos could pay for half a million people to go to Mars. (That said, if I had Bezos’ money, I’d buy flights from SpaceX to build a factory on the Moon to research space-based mining and manufacturing, and launch loops, with a view to expanding that into a full-blown colony over time).
> At Musk’s target price for Mars flights, someone as rich as Bezos could pay for half a million people to go to Mars.
That won't matter if SpaceX has a monopoly on the air they breath, the food they eat and the water they drink. One of the first legal questions they will grapple with is "Does earth law apply on Mars/to Martian citizens? Or is Bezos' contract moot"
Look at the history of colonization if you want to see the dynamic of human nature/greed/fiefdoms away from the mother country that is several-month's journey away. The Dutch East India company or the British South Africa Company may be decent case-studies, the only difference being that they could "live off the land" and exploit the natives. There are no natives on Mars, but I can't rule out exploitation.
> That won't matter if SpaceX has a monopoly on the air they breath, the food they eat and the water they drink.
Does the colony itself have to be owned by the transport company?
Any of the colony?
Including the life support, the factories which make the life support, the mining equipment which digs up the resources these factories use, or anything else?
I’m not expecting great things from human nature, but I expect Terran governments to forcefully insist on non-Monopolistic behaviour very quickly, even in the absence of abuse of power, as they’ll be lobbied by both potential investors and military hawks with “isolationism bad” rhetoric.
> [...]I expect Terran governments to forcefully insist on non-Monopolistic behaviour very quickly
All of the Terran governments? I think it would be trivial to play different governments with launch capability against each other, especially if you can mine asteroids (or have technology that's almost there and can promise to supply cooperative governments raw materials in exchange of access to a launch complex and their domestic food market). The promises of riches in the colonies drove competition among colonizing countries, I don't see how it would be any different, it would be trivial to set up subsidiaries in the US/Russia/China/France and see who bites first.
No entity based on Earth has juristiction on Mars. Over there, SpaceX will be the law. I don't see them forgiving loans and shuttling "contract-breakers" back to Earth for free.
That’s false. The Outer Space Treaty means anything launched from Earth remains the responsibility of the nation who launched it. SpaceX most certainly is under the jurisdiction of the US and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Will it make a difference? If it’s a one way trip, what’s earth going to do about it if some guy decides to play warlord on mars and commits atrocities to do so?
If that person owns the rocket company which got everyone there in the first place? The response will probably include seizure of all Earth based assets including the rockets, use of those rockets to fly to Mars, and by way of this give the idiot who thought it was a good idea to be obviously dangerous while in charge of interplanetary ballistic missiles a personal introduction to dangerous end of the first real human space marine.
Needless to say, the likely-Earth-based shareholders are likely to be unimpressed by such a colonial government.
If they don’t own the rocket company and don’t threaten the main colony? That might end up like Jonestown.
> If they don’t own the rocket company and don’t threaten the main colony?
And if they do threaten the main colony or even take it over entirely?
My point with my comment was that because mars is far away, any earth response on mars would be rather slow. Mars would have plenty of time to react if earth ships soldiers over or whatever and they wouldn't care about seizure of earth assets. As for ballistic missiles, to what end? Kill all the innocent colonists to get rid of the warlord?
Even if it was the person that owns the rockets, if they're on mars, they may no longer care about the earth assets. I mean, if its a one way trip, they wouldn't be able to do anything with them other than send supplies. I assume if they were to play warlord, its at a point where they no longer care about the supplies. If earth used those rockets to invade mars, mars would still have plenty of time to come up with a plan to shoot them down or whatever.
> Needless to say, the likely-Earth-based shareholders are likely to be unimpressed by such a colonial government.
If mars is a one-way trip away, why would they care about Earth-based shareholders?
Not saying such a takeover would end well for mars, just that the isolation leaves it wide open for some maniac to play warlord. I also think its more likely that its not the person who owns the rockets, if someone does decide to do that.
Bit of a shift, given that before your earlier comment we were discussing “is Musk and SpaceX being a bit feudal”, but sure.
Military action between the main colony and outliers is going to involve not-yet-invented doctrine and tactics because we don’t yet have enough experience of building such settlements to properly consider what warfare in or between them will look like.
One thing we can say is: anyone who looks like a dictator, and is based on Mars, and who has interplanetary rockets, is a threat to Earth, because while stealth in space can always be beaten by having more sensor coverage, it’s really hard to action that information. Likewise, Mars will see the Terran space marines coming and, depending on industrialisation level, either have a really hard time doing anything about it, or find they’re being preemptively RFG’d to stop them doing that to Earth.
(Hello MAD my old friend / how about a nice game of chess?)
> Bit of a shift, given that before your earlier comment we were discussing “is Musk and SpaceX being a bit feudal”, but sure.
Well, I was responding to:
> The Outer Space Treaty means anything launched from Earth remains the responsibility of the nation who launched it. SpaceX most certainly is under the jurisdiction of the US and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
My response being that jurisdiction may not mean anything, simply because of the distance involved. That was my point. If mars is a one way trip, then earths influence may turn out to be quite minimal, simply because its hard and slow to move between earth and mars. If earths influence is minimal, then jurisdiction is a rather moot point.
What do you think the first Mars colonies will be like? I bet living on an Siberian oil rig will be like a vacation compared to Mars, except you can't return to civilization if you've had enough.
...or any oil rig north of the polar circle... hostile environmental conditions combined with too many people crammed into too little living space and nowhere to go. Basically a prison camp, but with (I assume) higher than average wages (but nothing to do with the money except sending it home to the family on Earth).
(PS: this of course assumes that's there's anything to do on Mars, it's not clear to me what the Mars colonists would actually do there all day, except constructing the actual colony - but what then?).
>but the idea of people mining asteroids in poor third world-like conditions makes absolutely no sense to me. Or an evil megacorp that murders millions of people with no adequate explanation.
I haven't read the books but this just seems like the "British imperial colonialism but in space" trope typical of space opera.
Both of those things happen on Earth today. Haven't seen the show or read the book or whatever, but those both seem totally believable to me.
Earth mining is often done in horrendous and poor conditions. Megacorps and industry do kill millions of people on earth today with little explanation or repercussions.
Asteroid mining, if it ever happens, won't be done by poor exploited people toiling under the sun with pickaxes. It will be very expensive, and most likely fully automated. Even today Rio Tinto operations are becoming increasingly more automated. And a civilization that can mine asteroids should be unimaginably rich by our standards.
Sure, there were horrible industrial disasters like Bhopal, but in the book the aforementioned megacorp kills millions seemingly out of sheer evil. It felt too videogamey for my taste.
Is it hard to believe that an expansion to the rest of the solar system will be anything other than yet another gold rush, in the same way it has been for every "new frontier"?
And I don't just mean literal gold or mining.. The Internet in the late 90s and early 2000s, cryptocurrency today, etc... there will always be early adopters and entrepreneurial risk-takers (of varying levels of competency) who precede, and sometimes outlast, the corporations where there's money to be made..
In the Expanse lore, this happened because of the Epstein drive, a relatively cheap type of fusion drive that allowed humanity to go further faster, even in small scrappy ships.
So it would make sense that early pioneers would rush out to the belt and beyond to stake their claims..
Look at mining in the third world today. Not so automated, right? Why would it be any different out in the belt?
Hundreds of years and millions of people trying to eke out a living, particularly when you also consider the state of planet Earth in the Expanse (essentially a giant welfare state).. that creates an third-world equivalent out there, and I think it's pretty plausible..
Anyways, I respect your take on things regardless.. this is just mine.. the story gets so much better beyond book 1, if you're ever thinking about reconsidering. :-)
Hey, thanks for the comment. I totally respect the authors for writing hard sci-fi space opera. It's just that... the bleak hopeless future theme is getting a bit long in the tooth, you know? If I want to feel depressed I can just turn on the daily news.
Incidentally, can anyone recommend some hopeful science fiction? "Schismatrix" is probably my favorite.
Ian M Banks’ “Culture” series can be kind of hopeful in a way, in that the entire existence of the Culture itself is a neat space utopia. The stories themselves aren’t always hopeful in the small, though, but it’s that contrast that makes it so good!
That's one of the themes in "Schismatrix": part of mankind turn their back on technology (blamed for disasters like the melting of the ice caps) and stay on Earth, remaining stagnant for centuries. The remainder, not allowed to go back to Earth, colonize the solar system and evolve into new species.
The humanoids that populate the Culture belong to any number of entirely unrelated species that are capable of interbreeding through deliberate interventions (upgrades, really) that paper over the genetic, proteomic, biochemical, etc. differences.
None of those species are related to Earth's Homo Sapiens, or to any other species belonging to Earth's biosphere (though I think there might have been an allusion or two to panspermia insofar as origin-of-life goes).
So. When I say that Earth isn't part of the Culture, I mean to include anyone who has any Earth ancestors.
OTOH, the Culture has had observers, agents, etc. visit Earth (after being appropriately retrofitted to resemble Earth humans at least anatomically, and optionally biochemically and genetically) on occasion, to determine whether to continue with the policy of nonintervention. In the Culture books published so far, the policy holds.
Constellation Games, The Martian, Too Like the Lightning, Moving Mars, Nexus, Blue Remembered Earth,and The Caryatids are some hopeful SF that's come out recently that I recommend.
For what it's worth, and this is perhaps super light spoilers for the whole series, the "bleak hopeless future" is not a running theme for the series.
The authors have said they approached each book in the style of the characters and story they were telling at that time.
The first book is a noir detective novel (that happens to be set in space and in the future) so I can definitely see how it comes across as bleak..
The next book and beyond are written in different styles.
Thanks for the Schimatrix recommendation! I'd never heard of it, and I looked it up.. Added it to my reading list!
I might recommend The Inverted Frontier series by Linda Nagata to you, that I've only just started... It's pretty good and I think falls under the hopeful sci-fi category (at least so far). :-)
Sci-fi is full of thinly veiled social commentary. The sci-fi aspect distracts you from the fact that messages and themes are shallow and don't really stand on their own. I loved Star Trek as a kid, it inspired my imagination and I didn't really pick up on the social messages, watching it now it's sort of comical or just boring. But I do get a nostalgic feeling from it and it's entertaining enough to be second screen distraction material when doing boring tasks.
It is not thinly veiled: sci-fi is social commentary. Even Greg Egan dialling up the quantum mechanics is ultimately doing so to explore the societal consequences. As you point out, only children think it is actually about the damn robots and spaceships.
Yeah but the need to place it in sci-fi setting feels like adding fluff to mask the fact that the commentary is weak/trivial/boring or detached from reality/wrong.
I wish they made more sci-fi about robots and spaceships, I find that stuff entertaining and inspiring. If I want social commentary I have better sources than sci-fi writers.
> And there is Sci-Fi that's not social commentary.
I'm not sure that this is true. I think you might be confusing the Action and Adventure genres with Sci-Fi. Star Trek, for example, is almost 100% social commentary.
The Martian is the first thing that comes to mind as good Sci-Fi with very little social commentary, there is some politics/drama but it's mostly about the Sci-Fi.
I have to point out that The Martian is not science fiction, because the science in the book is, intentionally, not fictional. Merely having science in your narrative doesn’t make something science fiction, otherwise Greg House would qualify. If I remember right, the only liberty taken w.r.t known understanding in The Martian is with regard to the damage potential of Mars atmospherics.
It is certainly educational though, and to me, The Martian is rather in the category of “competence porn”
Data and Voyager's holographic doctor being central characters where their personhood is called into question sort of makes it about robots. There's a lot of science fiction scenarios with the holodeck, transporter, and various space anomalies for it to only be social commentary. Sometimes Star Trek does very much deal with science fiction scenarios.
If a third-world worker is cheaper than a fully automated system, then you can bet corporations will use them. The craft delivering the miners to the asteroid might be automated though. The back-to-base craft will be made operational only after video verification that the quota has been met.
Easy - the caring part is outsourced to a [Contract Agency] registered in a nation with lax human rights regulations.
If mental and long-term health is not a concern, minimal-subsistence living conditions can be made for pennies. If someone snaps or drops-out, they can be replaced from thousands of others on the long application list.
We're talking about space here. Minimal living conditions absolutely can't be made for pennies, and introduce enormous risks of destruction even without any human inside. And the energy requirements...
Fusion reactors and a bubble holding something just shy of one bar pressurized breathable air. Cheap enough when we talk about industrial scale asteroid mining. You just have to care a lot less about the people in these bubbles in space than we do now.
The thing is, they don't mine asteroids with pickaxes. They aren't up there brecause mining requires it, they are mining because existing up there requires the trade from mining and they aren't allowed to exists anywhere else. Perhaps the numbers are a little exaggerated, but you don't need many to make a space habitat appear hopelessly crowded. Take the inhabitants of Wyoming, coop them up on the existing fleet of cruise ships and see how crowded it will get. (a quick glance at Wikipedia numbers suggests that they will fit, but it won't be nice)
Sheer evil? It wasn’t personal or aimed at one specific group of people. It’s just the cost of doing business. Like other siblings said: that’s happening today all over the world. From Amazon warehouse workers to miners.
It isn't sheer evil in the novels, the corp wants to assess what's happening to people on a large scale if they become infected by the protomolecule. It's a study in a contained space.
Not that much different from unwilling participants in USA biological experiments in 20th century, like giving radioactive injections to pregnant mothers to observe damage to foetus...
The corporate scientists have also figured out that the protomolecule needs biomass. And the head scientist has transhumanist aspirations, with a justification that humanity needs to evolve quickly to deal with the god-like aliens that sent it. Not that it's a good justification, but in the first book, it's actually presented as a big temptation, even for some of the good characters.
The minimum wage in some countries is 10+ times higher than in others, yet the poorest citizens still spend everything on rented rooms (not even flats), food and transportation, no savings.
From what I've seen, cost of living will increase to the maximum level the poorest can afford it (which is why I don't see how UBI can work without massive changes in other areas).
I think a civilization can be unimaginably rich and still have imaginably poor people toiling away at lower levels.
With a laissez-faire system, the economic factors would decide whether machine or man labor is the most cost effective resource. When the mechanized means of production become more intelligent, faster, and accurate, what can the man or woman without any machines of their own do for money? They could work for less than the machines in dangerous conditions, doing the type of work that machines are too valuable for.
The optimist can also imagine a utopia where the need to labor vanishes and we collectively benefit from advances in science and technology, but that’s not a given.
Not sheer evil. They don't see people, just assets. If you have poor performing assets, you get rid of them. If you find a use for assets that is potentially more productive, why wouldn't you use them that way even if it destroys the asset in the process. It's all about profit/loss.
Read more history and you'll see this is pretty much SOP for humans.
Earth mining (and truck driving) is moving more and more towards robots and automation. In a 100 years time there probably won't be many traditional miners or truck drivers left on earth. So why does it make financial sense to send humans (and all the infrastructure they need) out to the asteroid belts to work as truckers and miners, when you could just send robots.
1. People want to go into the solar system. They need something to do.
2. We're nowhere near the level of smart, self-repairing automation. Given the distances involved, there's value in having a community of smart, agile, self-replicating flesh-and-blood humans to tackle unknown engineering challenges as they appear.
3. People keep expanding, and settle for good. Years pass. An interplanetary economy forms. People on the further edges focus on resource extraction and building up infrastructure for long-term settlement - but they still need things only Earth can provide, like food (and organics in general). So they trade.
4. Decades pass. On the outer edges of humanity, people are born who've never seen Earth. They start to develop their own culture and identity. Mars is being colonized. The trade arrangements is stable - Earth sells organics and R&D, they buy lots of resources to use for in-orbit manufacturing.
5. Many more decades pass. Mars is full of people who were born there, and never seen Earth in the first place. They trade with Earth and the space dwellers - the Belters, in Expanse - for resources. They develop their own culture too. Over generations, the Belters become adapted to low-gravity conditions, and can no longer survive Earth's gravity - cementing the cultural divide.
6. More decades pass, you arrive at the world of The Expanse. Mars and the Belt both declared independence, as they're their own separate cultures and nations. Trade dependencies, however, remain. Earth and Mars both have the advantage of infrastructure density and crucial resources abundance - they're developing their planets and surrounding orbital space. Stuck in an arms race, they develop superior military. Meanwhile, the Belters are stuck in a disadvantaged position. They own most resources in the Solar System, but can't effectively control them with inferior technology. And none of the resources are actually missing on Earth and Mars - they're just more expensive to get. The Belt has all the riches, but no leverage to turn them into wealth and power.
That's how you arrive at "mining asteroids in poor third world-like conditions".
Sometimes human livestock is cheaper than automation, especially when the value of life is cheapened.
As an example, slave societies don't have industrial revolutions because there's never a need to invest in labour-saving devices. Indeed, the Romans knew of water wheels and windmills but never used them much because you could just buy a few slaves. If slavery hadn't been introduced to Rome, who knows what alt-history would've emerged from the Roman engineering prowess.
The huge difference is that keeping humans alive on earth is really cheap and easy. Air and water is basically free, and with some tiny scraps of land you can basically make your slaves feed themselves via subsistence farming. They don't have to generate much value to be profitable.
Keeping humans alive in space on the other hand is stupidly expensive.
> Keeping humans alive in space on the other hand is stupidly expensive.
It is now. But the most expensive part of that is shuttling people and infrastructure up the Earth's gravity well.
Imagine that our society retains some level of sanity for the next couple decades. In that scenario, we'll continue on the path of expanding to space, starting with a rudimentary cislunar economy. This means near-Earth asteroid mining and in-space construction, which lets us drastically reduce the amount of mass needed to be launched into orbit. That economy would not be independent - it would sell resources mined in space (to be shipped to the surface) and manufacturing services, hopefully moving most heavy industry upwell. In exchange, they'd buy food, organics and specialized components from Earth.
Imagine couple decades of iterative improvement on this. Eventually, humans will be able to survive long-term in space with minimum input of terrestrial resources. E.g. almost-closed-cycle greenhouses that can supply a ship with food for a decade until they need restocking with substances that can't yet be created in space. Such capacity allows people to expand further, access more resources and ship them back.
What's the value for Earth in this? Continuing the exponential growth past the carrying capacity of the planet. The more industry is moved upwell, the more space there is downwell for habitation, consumption and service economy.
Why not robots? Light lag. To me, the challenges we need to overcome to send humans into interplanetary space are easier than those required for fully autonomic, AI-powered robots. If that's true, then we'll have to make interplanetary expansion a mixed human/robot endeavor. The time it takes for a signal from Earth to reach Mars is between 5 to 20 minutes - so 10-40 minutes RTT. This is unacceptable for any kind of serious remote operation, so even if robots do most of the work, you still want human controllers to be on the work site.
Once you start sending mixed human/robot on long-duration missions far from Earth, dumber robots operated more directly by humans - and, importantly, serviceable on-site, will be the cheapest option.
That's the key to that belter setting in The Expanse: their continued survival is expensive. They are refused access to all the places where their sustenance could be cheaper and this makes them infinitely exploitable.
In 100 years we may just as well have run out of resources for robots while (poor and desperate) people are aplenty.
They'd probably be volunteering to go, no one would need to force them.
Just a "fun" fact I discovered recently: it's cheaper to buy new powerbanks and salvage the battery cells than buy the battery cells themselves. It is also cheaper to buy a whole new laptop than replace a laptop processor. That is insane levels of wastefulness.
One of the most unrealistic things about depictions of futuristic computer systems and UI design is that they almost always do exactly what the character wants with a minimum of hassle. No, technology in the future is going to cause as many problems and as much frustration as it does today. And those problems will be more keenly felt, because in space, your life depends on the technology working properly. There should be episodes where, for example, the main challenge and risk doesn't come from aliens or hostile humans, but from the fact that the OS running the ship's engines crashes and needs to be restarted every 5 minutes.
There's one scene where a guy dies because his voice control malfunctioned and he couldn't use the manual controls because he was under too many Gs of acceleration.
It's a flashback to the invention of the fusion drive that allowed humanity to colonize the belts and outer planets, no less. It took place over a century before the events of the series, which itself is estimated to be around 2350 AD [1]. Clearly they've had plenty of time to not only work out the kinks but integrate the technology into society at a level far beyond what we see today with kids and their smartphones. The rock hoppers likely start developing the muscle memory needed to survive in space by grade school.
Which is probably why they show Detective Miller dropping critical gear first time he's on a space walk (he had never left the Ceres station before the events in the series).
Excellent point. Note that Solomon "Sol" Epstein dies as a direct result of his engine working too well and pressing him against his seat such that he couldn't turn it off.
> but from the fact that the OS running the ship's engines crashes and needs to be restarted every 5 minutes.
I would hope by the 23rd century that they’ve figured out that formally verified micro-kernel OSs are the way to go for mission-critical use cases like that.
You can’t formally verify behavior with subtle and specific hardware failures. Or in general interaction with reality. You can formally verify only internal logic.
Modern aviation disagrees with you. Yes, systems fail, but they fail very rarely, and usually disasters are long chains of failures, not "need to restart the engine every 5 minutes".
It's likely to assume the same will true for space travel, should it ever happen. Even in our current "duct tape and baling wire" stage of space flight, computer problems occur, but they're not regularly and frustrating, they are unique and pretty catastrophic.
Your inflight entertainment system still won't work with your headphones because you have the wrong plugs, though ;)
What gets me is not the interfaces to control things -- that seems believable -- but rather the ease/speed with which they answer questions about reams of data. Like, I work on a system with a database and to answer any complicated question I am like, "OK let me use the shell and write a query and check some stuff ... and then make sure that I'm asking the right question, and verify that this data looks right...", and here they are in a dozen (or 30) seconds finding all the craft that could have a telemetry that would intercept with some orbit, or cross-referencing passenger/crew manifests with other data.
It bugs me but not enough not to enjoy the show. ;)
In a similar vein, I also get bothered by the unrealistic fact that there are never compatibility issues between any given device/technology.
Since we are talking about The Expanse, I think a great example is whatever protocol allows for characters to physically fling data from their devices to other people's devices with a simple swipe.
I'll ignore the fact that sometimes they do this in city streets where they are surrounded by many potential recipients and somehow always deliver the payload to the right person...
But how likely is it that every single device's manufacturer implements that protocol in the same, non-proprietary way?
Because somebody, somewhere, finally got their shit together and decided that it's not a protocol without two independent implementations and a continually updated conformance test suite.
That's not specific to technology. Applies also to dialog and action. I don't mind this, but I'm getting tired of the transparent screens and random graphics.
I've always thought it would be really interesting to write a show where the characters speak in a way that mimics how real human being communicate with each other on a daily basis.
It might end up being really bad and hard to watch but I think it could be a refreshing alternative to what we have now where every character is able to give an on-the-spot motivational speech with the confidence of someone who rehearsed it for months before delivering it.
Just a real fictional story that includes realistic human dialog.
This style of improvised natural dialog is called "mumble-core". It's refreshing, but unfortunately not preferred by the highly polished products of TV and cinema today.
If the character is a professional software operator, someone like a programmer who spent years on his Emacs setup, then it actually might be realistic.
I remember a comment by Adam Savge on one of his YouTube videos where he visited the sets. He also had a brief cameo in one episode (as a ceew member of the Arboghast, I believe), sitting at a terminal. He remarks that the terminal screen wasn't just showing a random animation, but had a fledged out menu system that changed screens on touch input. So he could actually "use" the station while acting instead of just making stuff up.
As far as I know, a lot of films had only blank screens on set and the computer display was added in post, trying to match whatever "interaction" the actors came up with on the set.
I think programming simple UI has become remarkably easier in the last 6-7 years thanks to programs like Unity3D that a single programmer can probably handle all the UI for the entire show with ease.
One thing highly underrated in the show is the AI interactions. You ask the computer for something, and it provides the answer. No voice, no conversation, no sass, and most importantly, no anthropomorphism.
Imagine every single time you write a CLI command or perform a mouse click, the computer says "great! Let me do that for you". That's how Siri, Alexa interact. In the Expanse, giving the AI a command is like double clicking on a file. Fast, consise, no fuss.
It’s also because the rate of mistakes is high. You wanted a fifteen minute timer but got a fifty minute one? Whoops. Or worse, asking for driving directions for me typically has a 25% success rate, with me having to attempt multiple times to get directions to the place I’m actually trying to go to and not some similarly-named location six states over.
The designers (not just UI but all of them) on The Expanse did such an incredible job. It’s probably my favourite looking Sci Fi series or movie of all time. The attention to detail is incredible too, I’m on my third watch-through of the series and notice new things all the time.
They use an incredible number of off the shelf shower grab bars I recognize from Home Depot in the interior of pretty much every ship. I find things like that a bit distracting.
The Expanse uses a lot of repurposed props in general. One of the cryogenic pods in S2 is a roof storage rack for a car. The flight controls in the Rocinante are 3DConnexion mice. I recall seeing one maintenance tunnel with walls covered in laptop cooling pads. And so on. :)
I like that they thought about that, in a lot of shows and movies you see ships in space where gravity may not exist at times with no visible way for people to move themselves around under zero-g, so its refreshing when a show puts in the work to create a set that looks usable in space.
Some things work differently on TV and on books, and they changed things to make the storytelling better suited to TV. For example Camina Drummer was introduced much earlier in the TV series so that Fred Johnson had someone to talk to on screen, which wasn't needed in the novels. And then the character worked so well that they expanded it to cover more stuff.
I really like that they prefer a good story over sticking to the exact "canon" of the novels. And in "they" I include the novel authors, who are very involved in the TV series.
Don't get your hopes up too high; "The Expanse" is often nicknamed "The Expense" due to its high special effects budget. Amazon Prime may decide that later seasons need to have their budgets cut.
Game of Thrones did not have a budget problem for the last season; it had a writing problem. While other seasons used the novels for the build-up and for the story to make sense, the last season did not. And while the author does know where he wants to land, he hasn't worked out, or hasn't shared, how to get there completely yet. The tv show went there with no proper buildup, which is what makes that season poor. To me, the final situation, or who wins/dies, is not the problem, nor are the effects.
As for The Expanse, it's season not seasons; the next season will be the final season. I cannot see the tv series ending in the same end point as the final novel, that is I cannot see them cramming four novels with one huge time gap in between into one season. But I do believe it will come to a satisfactory conclusion at some alternative end point.
If the show runs into any problems it wont be because they ran out of source material and winged it like what happened with Game of Thrones. I doubt budget will be an issue since they've already wrapped filming the final season. The expense of The Expanse may be why its stopping where it is. But I have no reason to think the show wont end strong at this time.
After having watched all of the show released so far, I just finished Leviathan Wakes.
Maybe it's my fault for having mostly read Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams for the last few years, but I found the writing to be extremely bland. It does the job of narrating the plot but the lack of all flavor would have turned me off immediately if I wasn't able to visualize the characters and scenes from the show.
That said, I'm pretty happy with the changes they made for the show. And a bit annoyed that most of the things I didn't really like about the characters were details carried over from the books.
I also found the series lacking humour, but maybe that's because I've only mostly watched Mock The Week and Have I Got News for You for the last few years.
I absolutely love how they changed "Ashford" in the books from an elitist obstructive middle manager into "Klaes Ashford" - legendary OPA member, space pirate and "The Ghost Knife of Callisto".
The show really gives the opportunity to explore the individual motivations of the characters; the books are also great and they complement each other, but I feel that the books are almost too fast paced to really savour the environment and setting.
That scene in the behemoth in s3e11 between camina and ashford is one my favourite. Their discussion of what it is that makes belters what they are in that situation, such great writing
I agree. I read the books after watching the first four seasons, and I felt disappointed how Ashford is described and handled in the books.
Also, the books set a very high bar for Naomi's "solo adventure" (let's call it that to prevent spoilers), and the series did such a great job, and stayed very true to the source. It was satisfying seeing this unravel almost exactly as I had imagined it.
The Cibola Burn book did a much better job of explaining things on Illus, particularly the alien stuff. And the Investigator POV chapters were wild. You don't get as much of that on the show.
I have to say I was much more taken with the description of computers in the books. Maybe it was more me projecting than what was actually there, but what I took away from it were computer systems that worked without networking most of the time, were fault tolerant and had most of their power through programmability, which ordinary people were able to access.
This reminded me so much of the ideas and visions of early computing environments and even though the books don't dwell much on computers, I found it really fascinating to see these echos there.
In comparison, the visual design of the show is just ... nice? But seems honestly pretty impracticable most of the time and I felt doesn't really set itself apart from other contemporary Sci-fi Shows.
Near the end of Cibola Burn, there was this part that gave some extra details about the hand terminals they use. I almost cried when reading it.
A computer that's designed to work off-line just as well as on-line, that can form mesh networks with other hand terminals on the fly when needed, not tied to any specific vendor in any particular way. It's how smartphones should obviously work, except they don't, because real humanity is shitty in so many subtle ways in which even most dystopian sci-fi humanity isn't.
Several times while watching the show I’ve had my suspension of disbelief interrupted by thinking “There’s no way all these computers would interoperate so seamlessly, without vendor walled gardens and layers of security constraints.” It is a nice vision of an impossible future!
Welcome to what happens when the common network and routing infrastructure is privately owned. Proprietary standards. Subscriber ident, discriminatory "I will/won't service you today" sets the tone for how things work. Mesh interop is more than doable. It just ain't profitable, nor is it desirable from the centralized controllability perspective.
Yeah, I felt the same way. I think, however, that smartphones will change as humanity spreads out a bit. On mars, a smartphone will need to deal with only local servers. On deep space, it'll need to mesh network with surrounding devices.
I spent an inordinate amount of time while watching the show just thinking about how you manage the computer systems on a spaceship, especially if you're a scrappy crew without a large corp's support.
Presumably, every space ship needs bulletproof software routines for calculating trajectories, making burns at the right time, etc- a combination of real time hardware control and sophisticated math.
But presumably, ships need to get updated in-flight, and upgraded routinely, and presumably, it doesn't make sense for your own ship to drift too far from the common development tree. This is starting to become a major software engineering problem- how do you manage a fleet of ship firmwares across a solar system?
No, those don't really change (there might be data updates to include newly discovered celestial objects). But any ship that operates in space will eventually need some custom work and some of that would need to be merged back into mainline or maintained as a patch.
It would be necessary to upgrade if, for example, new devices were installed in the ship, which were developed after the original ship firmware was installed.
There will absolutely be space hackers taking advantage of this type of vulnerability, and I think that's the coolest shit my 12 year old brain could've come up with.
A ship on the sea (or in space) is independent and things always come up. Pretty much the whole history of ships has shown that you need to make updates and modifications and get tech upgrades as/when possible.
And then even without these updates ships are fine running legacy software controlling obsolete hardware. As long as spares are available. Would a major navy, like the Martian one, keep their fleet up to date? Sure. Would it be done in flight? I don't think so. As today, this stuff is done during major maintenance in shipyards. Same goes for today's planes.
Well hardware maybe, but i think that software does not degrade the way hardware does. There is a lot of firmware which never gets updated and devices just keep working as long as the hardware is still ok.
I imagine some futuristic version of git where... basically git but they've got better merge algorithms after they've solve NP and P.
You can sync to the trees of ships near you and catch up, and once in a while one of them gets to a station and updates to the tip of wherever development is at.
Why there is no light on space Sci Fi series or movies?.
I find it extremely hard to believe that people that master ships at the speed of light, that have nuclear and possible antimatter engines just can't effort proper lighting, like they don't know LED lights, fluorescent lights everywhere.
All films just look like submerged nuclear submarines on red alert,but all the time. On nuclear submarines you have way more light most of the time.
We know that we need strong light exposure in order not the develop illnesses like myopia. Mood is affected badly by lack of light.
I can understand it in games,it was the first trick for hiding a bad 3D engine, make everything dark, but it is not necessary anymore.
Not sure if you've seen the Expanse, but two comments:
1. The stills here look edited, possible to focus the UIs for the article. I may be misremembering but I don't remember being unable to make out characters on screen!
2. The protagonists in the show comandeer a Mars ship and most shots take place inside it. For narrative reasons, UN ships are bright, Mars ships are black/dark red (and Belter ships are broken, Star Wars rebels style), so the in-space look changes a lot (though the main set is that one Mars ship).
Martian and Belter ships less so (still, the Rocinante's crew quarters were fine and we've not really seen many ships outside of battle/emergencies) because they were adapted to lower light conditions on their homeworlds, I think that was said once if I'm not mistaken. The Martian delegation to Earth had to wear sunglasses all the time, for example.
> I can understand it in games,it was the first trick for hiding a bad 3D engine, make everything dark, but it is not necessary anymore.
It's become necessary in movies and series as well, because stuff is mostly CGI now.
Look at Star Trek in the golden era (TNG-ENT) vs. what it is now. Despite aging props, the former looks real (if cheesy; color choices in early TNG didn't age well). Federation ships are solid, clean, and brightly lit. That's because they were real, physical sets. Discovery/Picard? It's all dark, and while it may also be a stylistic choice, the fact is that if they lightened it up, all the CGI sets and blinkies would stand out like sore thumbs.
On a related note: I can close my eyes and imagine myself walking around the bridge of Enterprise-D, touching the panels, sitting in the captain's chair. I can almost feel the texture of the chairs, the friction of the carpet, the glassiness of the panels. Can't do that with Discovery. When I close my eyes, I just see non-solid holograms. I can't imagine what would it be like to touch them.
Physically based rendering, as awesome as it is, still seems to subtly fail in reproducing various kinds of materials. Between various games (including AAA productions) and movies I've seen over the years, I haven't encountered one where a CGI piece of metal actually looked like a piece of metal upon closer inspection. Everything looks like make-believe plastic.
I'd advise you to look at some behind the scenes or blooper reel footage of Discovery. There's a lot more practical effects going on on the bridge than what I'd have thought. These see-through displays are actually practical and not post effects.
I'm wondering if the darker look is because they film Picard and Discovery with multiple cameras and there's more crew and equipment on set that might show up in stray reflections.
It's an artistic choice, it's not meant to say anything about technology. To the extent that it does say anything about technology, it's the HDR video of the present day that makes a difference.
Heavily chiaroscuro lighting is a trend, like the orange-and-blue colour grading that preceded it. It looks like the Expanse has gone for "just blue" with occasional red highlights. A side effect of this is unfortunately unnatural-looking skin tones. Absolute peak example: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5438bd1be4b044...
Look at what's highlighted in red there. If it helps, run it through an aggressive blur filter and look at what shapes remain. Face of the woman on the left, details of her uniform, the ship on the display in the middle, and balanced out with the guy at the back right in a red zone.
(Also this is why SF directors love transparent or "holographic" displays, because you can film the person looking at the screen and the thing being displayed at the same time)
It may also be a deliberate contrast with the dated future of 2001 and subsequent works where interiors were often extremely white and clean.
This is also to tell the viewer who the people on screen are, because you start to subconsciously associate the color palette with different factions. Hence the blue lighting on UN ships and the red on Mars'.
> (Also this is why SF directors love transparent or "holographic" displays, because you can film the person looking at the screen and the thing being displayed at the same time)
I caught an episode of NCIS a few weeks ago and noticed they had a plexiglass screen up in the interrogation room cuz of covid.
But I also realized it let them get both characters' faces in the shot at the same time thanks to the reflection, despite sitting across the table from each other (and they of course framed everything to take advantage of this).
Not limited to Sci-Fi shows. I recall watching the first shows of CSI back in 2000 and thinking how dumb it was for the techs to work in those horribly dark labs.
I actually pondered this recently, as I watched an indie film where all the shots where lit quite realistically, meaning people had nice bright offices etc.
And it struck me that even though this lighting looked more proper, in terms of that's how an office would look if someone worked in it, it just didn't look as good or interesting as those with more contrast ala CSI.
I'm sure it can be done, but it's probably easier to get an interesting look with more shadows rather than less.
Something I noticed when reading the books is that the authors describe the specific type of LED lighting in every scene they introduce:
> The tunnel outside was white where it wasn’t grimy. Ten meters wide, and gently sloping up in both directions. The white LED lights didn’t pretend to mimic sunlight.
> The lights—recessed white LEDs—gave the gray walls a sterile cast.
> They drank it without talking [...] in the artificial morning of the room’s LEDs.
> The lights were cheap LEDs tinted a false pink that was supposed to flatter the complexion but instead made everyone look like undercooked beef.
A lot of the settings in the Expanse are located in remote areas (often far away from the sun), where spare parts are rare and energy is expensive - at least more expensive than on Earth.
Additionally, people work in shifts on all stations and ships, and you can't constantly mess up people's circadian rhythm by simulating daylight 24/7.
Ironically, in the first book they talk about how a station is always lit to simulate daylight 24/7 :P Something about how they used to simulate a day/night cycle but stopped.
FWIW, Klingon ships were famously dark in the Star Trek's golden era, and also full of vapor/smoke obstructing vision. Obviously, this was done to make them seem more menacing. However, some fans - myself included - adopted an in-universe explanation: Klingon eyes respond to a slightly different slice of the EM spectrum than human ones; their ships are well-lit, just on the wavelengths imperceptible to us (probably infrared, and the dark reddish illumination we see is just what bleeds over to human-perceptible wavelengths), and the vapors are transparent on those wavelengths too.
Literally in the first episode, one character has a nervous breakdown and I quote: "We can so far into the darkness. Why couldn't we have brought more light?"
As a book reader i enjoyed the show a lot. But when I now see YouTube reactors I enjoy so much how clueless they are at any stage of the show. Every week an expanded view of the story reveals to them but the result: They know nothing :)
I found that they completely butchered my favorite characters from the book series. Holden is way over the top macho and gets in "check out my ego" screaming matches with folks all the time, Bobby is at least emotionally a weak-willed little girl who lets herself get bossed around by everyone, and especially male authority figues. Etc. Their interpretation of the character gallery was really disappointing. The books' authors have made some really cool non-heteronormative and super competent characters, which is one of the many aspects of the series that I really enjoyed.
Does this get better in the latter seasons that were produced by Amazon?
Bobbie taking over the luxury ship with her power armour is in my top 10 book moments.
> You use a welding rig to weld things. You use a gun to shoot things. You use a Bobbie Draper to fuck a bunch of bad guys permanently up. (Babylon's Ashes)
Overall they improved characters. Ashford is a cartoon in the books but is absolutely delightful and interesting on the show. Drummer barely exists in the books and might be my favorite show character.
I really like how they transition between different screens so seemlessly with guestures (and also voice commands). I'd like to be able to do something similar on my phone so rather than clicking the chromecast icon and selecting which device, I'd like to swipe/flick towards the device I want to use. And ideally I'd like to expand (sorry) this to non-chromecast stuff like Spotify Connect (or MPD etc). Is there anything out there like that for Android? Some kind of location/orientation aware "casting" helper?
Relatedly I wish there was less of a delay when trying to cast to the TV. Perhaps it's that, rather than the extra button clicks, that disrupts the flow so much. It's not like my smart TV hasn't got a powerful processor and a super-fast internet connection - why am I still seeing loading screens?!
Speaking about transition of graphical applications from one device to another, I think this is a rather difficult problem in itself. The only project I'm aware of, which tries to enable that in a seamless way, is the Arcan display server.
I remember a short clip from the development blog [1], where a window with a running retro game is pulled to the edge of the screen and appears immediately on another device nearby [2].
Unfortunately Arcan is pretty niche and I doubt that will change in the foreseeable future.
Using voice commands to control, where your applications is running, would then be relatively easy. Swiping in that direction, while pretty cool, is much harder, as you would need to locate both involved devices.
> I really like how they transition between different screens so seemlessly with guestures (and also voice commands).
The greatest part of this is that they make it look seamless and unselfconscious. In most shows (even sci-fi ones) this is always exaggerated as in "look at how we move our hands on this futuristic surface". In Expanse? It's just an integrated part of what they do. They flick, and swipe, and hold stuff sideways, they drop phones, phones are cracked, and it's never "oh, look carefully at what I'm doing".
I liked during the early seasons how Detective Miller's phone screen was cracked. Don't recall seeing that in any other show. It lends credibility to the narrative that these are real people who break their phone screens sometimes and can't be bothered to get it fixed.
I want to add a comment I haven't seen anyone has touched on yet.
There is a lot of storytelling done through computer interfaces in the show: revealing secrets, showing in-universe propaganda, showing ships and missiles move through the vastness of space, and so on.
The show also makes a point in juxtaposing shots of UIs against shots of the realities those UIs represent. It paints a stark contrast the cleanliness and sterility of computer interfaces against the grittiness and horror of the Expanse world. We get to see the decision makers seeing missiles as dots traveling along holographic arc lines, but then we also get to see civilians and military personnel being blown up and shredded.
When I was watching the show, I took special notice of gestures, and it was fun how same swipe up was either sending video to everyone around, or putting video feed on a big screen, or sending stuff to one specific person standing nearby. I wondered how those devices understood the context of the action.
Also, those devices privacy sucks! Everyone around can see what happens on you glowing screen that is transparent from both sides!! Under no circumstances could such devices be sold to real users.
Adam Savage did an interview with one of the prop masters of the show, and he brought up the "privacy" issue and agreed that it sucks. But if they used "realistic" pads, he said 1) they would have to move the camera around in awkward ways so that we could see what the characters were seeing on their screens, and 2) most of what we (the audience) would see would be the black/gray backs of these pads with nothing interesting on them.
So it was an intentional choice for convenience and visual effect, rather than an attempt at "realism". Sounds like they totally agree with your statement, though.
In the very first episodes a tall, stretched-out skinny space-born dude is getting tortured simply by making him stand and be subject to Earth's gravity.
Then the rest of the series-- few to no tall, stretched-out skinny space-born peeps anywhere.
What gives? I imagine the director realizing how expense it would be to continue seeking out a bunch of tall, skinny extras...
I remember an interview with the showrunners that basically said that. There weren't enough tall and skinny people to perform all the roles adequately, not to mention background extras. And it limited them from casting the actors they really wanted to cast, like Jared Harris as Dawes.
They do still deal with the disorientation non-natives deal with in Earth conditions, though. There was an episode that spent a significant amount of its story showing Bobby dealing with being on Earth for the first time and seeing unfiltered sunlight and the extra gravity. There's been a few other instances of it, but it has definitely taken a backseat since that torture scene you mentioned.
Also in the books. In the beginning, belters were hardly able to live on Earth let alone move around. Later, they colonize planets. So I get why that was dropped as a plot device. And since it was only one scene, it didn't have much of an impact anyway.
It was because in the beginning they wanted to put the idea that belters were different in people's head, but to do it the entire series would be too expensive. They got rid of the issue in-universe with the bone-growth meds (?) that Miller and probably others took (in the books this didn't exist, and all belters are tall).
I can imagine an alternate universe failed version of The Expanse where they spent all their money up front on CGI to create stretched-out skinny extras.
Viewing maps of space is perfectly suited to holographic displays. A 2D map is simply not adequate. Having a map of space projected in a hologram or even VR allows you to grasp the position of objects accurately in three dimensions.
On the other hand, you have to rely on moving your head around to get a perspective. 3d is probably better, but these [1,2] animated images allow to see it in static as well. Can’t find better examples quickly, but I hope one can get the idea.
I love the Expanse.
Yet I think that transparent displays only work in movies.
What do we need the transparency for? I can’t find any UX reason that would make such a screen better than a regular superthin opaque display with maybe holographic features.
Discuss :)
We don't need them. They're popular because they allow to film the actor and the screen simultaneously.
My personal take: transparent displays are a lazy trick of film makers who overestimate the importance of characters in science fiction, and underestimate the importance of setting.
A proper real-world use of transparency would be Augmented Reality - i.e. overlaying contextual UIs on top of the real world the user sees through the glass/hologram.
>transparent displays are a lazy trick of film makers who overestimate the importance of characters in science fiction, and underestimate the importance of setting.
Characters are always more important than setting. You can tell a compelling story with a character alone in a room, but without any characters even an interesting setting has nothing to say.
Characters are always more important than setting.
Not among sci-fi fans. There are lots of classic and beloved scifi books that are all about the world and setting and technology where the characters are 2d cardboard cut outs that only exist as an excuse to move the story from set piece to set piece.
Yeah, but at least to me, they became unreadable as I grew to be able to recognize how much the 2d carboard is not unrealistic and empty. I like sci-fi, but when I encounter these, they annoy me.
Good sci-fi writers dont go lazy on characters and actually develop them.
Would you consider the characters of The Three Body Problem to be all that interesting? Yet it's widely considered to be a great novel. Not sure whether The Dark Forest or the third book do a better job with characters, but the plot and the ideas make the story.
That's the mainstream view, yes. But honestly, in case of sci-fi, I mostly disagree.
Most literary genres are defined by the flavor of character exploration you do. Any character-focused story you want, you can find a genre for it. Science fiction is defined as speculative exploration of interactions between people and hypothetical advancements of science and technology. If you laser-focus on the characters, you lose what makes the genre interesting and distinct from all others.
That's not to say that characters aren't important. But, in the kind of sci-fi I like, technologies and societies and institutions become "characters" themselves, and need to be treated with equal importance.
> A proper real-world use of transparency would be Augmented Reality - i.e. overlaying contextual UIs on top of the real world the user sees through the glass/hologram.
Ghost In The Shell does this very well, especially the series.
> My personal take: transparent displays are a lazy trick of film makers who overestimate the importance of characters in science fiction, and underestimate the importance of setting.
Given that we are talking about extremely popular show, maybe they do actually know what they are doing.
Well, of course :). That's why studios generally don't listen to sci-fi fans like me. I want them to optimize for the genre fans, to maximize work depth and quality. They want to optimize for the widest possible audience, to maximize profits.
I was inspired by the transparent 3D displays. It looked like exactly what I'd want.
I can't think which episodes, but there's are a couple scenes where detective Miller is looking at his phone in 2D mode, and he says, "Go 3D." In one scene, he interacts with the 3D projection, reorienting it. In another scene, invoking the 3D display makes it possible for everyone in the room to discuss the projection.
I'd love to know how these effects were done. And, when can I have one of those phones?
Agreed. I get why they are used in media (cool factor), but in real world the loss of contrast for actual material on screen would be disaster enough to make it a nonstarter. And that is not even going into privacy implications...
That spy guy (I don't remember his name) in series 1 has this ability when he's re-wiring the airlock door interface panel in order to escape. He uses his AR ability a few times but I like how it's not overdone.
My biggest issue with the visual aspects of The Expanse is one that I don't think can be fixed.
The story is set approximately 3-400 years in the future. All of the technology, however, looks, if not immediately familiar, then more or less "around the corner from now".
Go back to 1621, and imagining projecting a future 2021 based on "minor tweaks to what we're using now". Clearly, it would be absolutely nothing remotely like the actual 2021 that we live in.
I enjoy the Expanse a lot, but if there are humans around in 2400 or so who get a chance to see it again, I'm fairly sure they will be besides themselves with laughter at its "vision" for their time.
They do have the Epstein drive, holographic displays, anti-cancer-cell „dialysis“, a solar-system-wide internet, miniaturized electron microscopes, and insanely long-lasting batteries.
But, I must admit that eg the terminals look like phones from 2050. And I‘m sorely missing AI, humanoid robots, and way more bionic implants a la Cyberpunk. However I think those were left out deliberately to allow the story to be mainly about the human experience. AIs like the one in „Her“ might be realistic on a 400 year time scale, but I find stories like that rather awe-inspiring than relatable.
I remember reading somewhere that the authors of the book series intentionally left out AI in the story - as to not take away from the human aspects of the story. AI is there, just in the background with context specific voice activated commands.
books haven't been around forever, and in particular printed books are only about 600 years old.the basic concept of a bound set of pages is about 1500 years old.
pen technology in 2021 looks absolutely nothing like pen technology in 1621. I don't think a person from that time would visually recognize a modern pen, even if they could understand its purpose once it was explained or they got to use it.
paper is only about 1200 years old.
None of these technologies has "been around for ever", although one could clearly make a case that barring total civilizational collapse, they might truly be here to stay.
I don't think that the same could be said for any current computing technology.
Sailing technology is similar, except that very few people ever sail, travel in sailboats, receive goods shipped in sailboats, or even see a sailboat. The things that have largely replaced sailing would look very foreign to someone from 1621. I suspect the same will be true in 2400. There will still be some people (perhaps) using technology that we're familiar with today, but most people will use something else.
I think that the Expanse (books & show) do a fairly good job at explicitly not making the future look that cool. Despite the specific new technologies that are around, people's live contain about the same amount of misery, tech breakdowns and general impossibility as we do today.
They clearly drew from some other highly technical areas in their design: for example incorporating Réseau plates or drawing on the visual layout of air traffic control screens.
Completely opposite of what the Expanse UX/UI is. No touchscreens, no transparency, no sexy decoration, zero ambiguity, no distractions. Everything is functional first, ergonomic, clear and straightforward.
I kind of wish Sci-fi authors would propel analog UIs. Touchscreens and manipulating things at an arms length - try it for 10 mins and see how tired your arm gets.
I’d like to see a future that’s totally opposite of what everyone is praising in this thread.
Even reality is moving in the "glass cockpit" direction. For example, the SpaceX Crew Dragon doesn't appear to have much of any "steam" controls or displays. Most of the control is preplanned however, so there isn't as much pilot input than a F-15C would use..
Love the show and the UI displays on it are no exception. And the post was interesting to read, but was anyone else annoyed by the way images were displayed on the site? You have to click on each image to see it and then use the browser back button to get back to the post! There must be better ways to arrange viewing of groups of images.
I haven't viewed the site on a desktop but on the iPad at least you tap on an image and then swipe to see the next ones. Also there's a close button in the top right to get back to the article.
There is a scene in S02E03 where Miller chides a Belter about the music he's listening to, so the Belter picks up his mobile device to turn it off. When he picks it up it must be in the wrong orientation, because he flips it over in his hand. You're telling me there's no autorotate in 2300? Worst. Episode. Ever.
It may be a case of apologetics, but autorotate only makes sense when there is a discernible gravational field, and as belters are often in low/simulated gravity, i would make sense.
If I flip my iPhone over 180° today it doesn’t autorotate. I wouldn’t expect it to in the show given the terminals are asymmetrical with the electronics at the bottom.
Plus it’s a cheap belter phone. Poor bastards aren’t getting the expensive feature rich terminals.
I loved the books, and am
giving the tv show another chance after being turned off by the casting (Naomi in particular was jarringly, distractingly different from the character in my mind). Glad I revisited it and got past that, bc overall it's really well done.
Tangent: can anyone explain the inscrutable titles?
I like the Expanse as a story and ideas and for the few characters that are worth it (most are flat drones), but its aesthetic is not very original , most of this stuff has been redone countless times in game design . Still great to look at but i think they could have done better artistically.
If you close up on the UIs of any Belter ship all the screens are translated into Belter. When the Roci gets a ship directly in it's sights, the targeting system will signal "Hammer Lock". The Belter ships say "Hamma Lok".
Spitballing: a large screen in the middle of a space ship being transparent would allow someone to see the entire bridge while still seeing what’s on the screen, maybe?
I genuinely hate the impracticable UI design being pushed on TV-&-Movies in the last decade. Normies expect similar interface from everything but don't even understand that it's bad.
It's like putting yogurt on Pizza dough instead of mozzarella and calling it New York Pizza. Please stop...
Not just the UI, but The tech is realistic and possible and usually backed up by basic scientific principles.
The social scenarios are also quite likely in the future.
Even the language makes sense - a kind of hodge-Podge universal accent.
And it tangentially originates from Larry Niven’s belter stories just before mankind sent the ram robots to distant stars.
The Expanse is everything to like.