Transfer Orbit
Waking the Leviathan
The story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to blockbuster TV series
, before Syfy debuted its adaptation of the series in December. I’m reprinting it now with some minor edits.
If you enjoy this post, please consider signing up as a subscriber or sharing this post on social media.
Image: Alcon
It’s March 2015, and I am standing on the bridge of a starship. The crew work stations look worn, the walls are covered with warning signs, and the grated floor looks like something designed to be functional. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that I was standing on a real ship, hurtling through space. Instead, I am on the set of a new television series, a location that, until now, only existed in words on a page.
I ve always looked at the show as being a sort of retelling of the same story, so it feels very independent to me from the book version. I don t think there s a need there to keep those working in lockstep, which gives us some freedom, Abraham tells SYFY WIRE. Even as we re keeping true to the spirit, moving into the last act of the show there s a natural shape to the show and the underlying story, and I think putting those two where they reinforce each other and get to a graceful stepping off place has been, creatively, really satisfying and effective.
Image: Amazon Studios
Fans of
The Expanse got some mixed messages last month just before Thanksgiving. That’s when Amazon announced that it had ordered a sixth season of the popular science fiction show. Unfortunately, that sixth season would also be its last. The move meant that content from several of the novels that the show is based were basically guaranteed to be left out entirely. Speaking with Polygon on Tuesday, writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck declined to call it a cancellation. Instead, they prefer to think of it as a pause.
“We have what we think is a very natural pause point for the story after season 6,” Franck told Polygon during a press event for the new season. “It’ll feel like a satisfying end to the story we’ve been building over the first five seasons. I think one of the things that is sort of an outmoded idea is the idea of being canceled.”