The Expanse: Books 1 and 2 by James S.A. Corey

From The Week of September 24, 2012 While many, in our civilization, have rightfully blamed religion for much of the chaos and war that have tormented the last 2,000 years of human history, science is equally capable of enshrouding the world in death and darkness. For science without morality is not a tool by which progress is made through rationality; it is nothing more than a systemic means by which the few exploit the many in the name of the greater good. Good science, then, must adhere to the same standard that drives good religion, a positive, ethical framework that always places the rights of the individual above the welfare of the masses, knowing that, to do so, guarantees the rights of everyone. This is a difficult lesson, one that requires us all to overlook our biases to glimpse a deeper, more universal truth about human behavior. It is a lesson devastatingly taught in these first two volumes of a fascinating and disturbing trilogy.

Centuries from now, humanity will not have solved all of the problems that plague it today. There will not be medical cure-alls that dispel all diseases; there will not be wonderful technologies that obviate the need for extractive economies; there will not be political structures that promote good works while discouraging corruption. Instead, there will exist a species much like our own. Oh, humans will have invented interplanetary engines that will allow them to settle on the planets and moons of our solar system. They will even have made discoveries in genetic engineering that will allow them to grow useful crops on these inhospitable rocks, allowing humans to live and breathe in any of a dozen habitats beyond the orbit of Earth. But the underlying inequities will remain. The shortsighted sins that have hobbled our species for the whole of recorded history will still be with us, only now the greedy and the lustful, the powerful and the ambitious, will be armed with weapons and engines capable of destroying entire civilizations.

In Leviathan Wakes, the series' opening salvo, we meet two very different individuals trying to live in this dangerous, complicated universe. James Holden is the executive officer of the Canterbury, a spaceship designed to retrieve water, in the form of ice, from the solar system's less hospitable zones and deliver it to human habitats where it can be bought and consumed by the some 40-billion humans who now live and flourish in the glow of our star. An idealist, formerly of the UNN, the naval arm of the United Nations armed services, Holden endeavors always to act in the best interests of his crew and of humanity. And if that means he must trumpet dangerous truths from the deck of his ship to the rest of the solar system then that is how it must be. Consequences be damned... For truth must always triumph over secrecy. There is no other way for justice to prevail over corruption.

Joe Miller is Holden's polar opposite. A middle-aged detective thoroughly captured by the harsh demands of policework, he has been beaten down by thirty years of investigations and arrests that never seem to make a dent in the crime he's been contracted to control. No matter what he does, no matter what he says, vice will continue to flourish in a society plagued by inequities and broken dreams. His life takes a decidedly sharp turn, however, when he is asked to retrieve a wayward rich girl from the slums of the asteroid belt and forceably return her to the wealth and privilege of her Martian parents. For in accepting this contract, he stumbles upon a terrible secret. Someone is playing with genetics in a way so foul that it disgusts even the hard-hearted Miller who, through circumstance and good fortune, teams up with a grieving and infuriated Holden to get at the heart of a most grotesque mystery. Someone has unleashed a terrifying virus upon humanity. But why? And to what end? In Caliban's War, the series' second instalment, ambition has once again endangered the human race. The protomolecule, that most alien and incomprehensible virus that ignited so much death and chaos in Leviathan Wakes, has resurfaced in two vastly different ways. The most obvious strand is currently feverishly reconfiguring Venus, transforming it from a Hellish hothouse into a planet of unimaginable design and destiny. The subtler strain is at work in a secret laboratory on Ganymede, a populated moon of Jupiter, where the theft of some immuno-compromised children has gone entirely unnoticed thanks to a quick but brutal shooting war between troops loyal to Mars and Earth. When the dust has settled and Ganymede lays in ruins, sixteen missing children is hardly a priority except for one man, the desperate father of one f the girls who'll do anything to get her back. Holden and his crew, made frantic by the protomolecule's re emergence, adopt the father's mission in hopes of it leading them to the powers who insist on risking humanity's very existence.

Dominated by blood and war, zombies and viruses, The Expanse is exquisite, cinematic science fiction. James Corey, the pen name for a collaborative effort between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, has assembled from numerous inspirations two powerful, winningly original novels that are as painfully realistic as they are unflinchingly gory. Many influences are made manifest here, from the horror of Dean Koontz to the institutional corruption of Richard Morgan, to the space-combat realism of C. J. Cherryh, to the biological realism of Paul McAuley. But The Expanse is neither a re-imagination of, nor dependent upon, these influences. On the contrary, it rises well above the fray, rejecting the derivative destinies of most works of its kind to chart its own ambitious and exhilarating course.

There is plenty here for everyone: political corruption, institutional mismanagement, zombie horrors and creepy alien technology. There are wars and firefights, terraforming and genetic engineering, but in the end the series' genius lies in its characters who were as carefully laid out as they are stunningly realized. Holden's idealism set against Miller's cynicism is the most obvious and successful polarization, but Abraham and Franck have taken just as much care with their world's secondary characters, animating them with a power that can be both delightful and terrifying. There is an exquisite exactitude here, a vanishingly rare attention to character detail that makes every single one of the actors in this drama come to life to a degree that puts to shame the efforts of lesser lights.

There is no question in my mind that The Expanse is the kind of science fiction that could be successfully brought to the silver screen, causing a new generation of TV-viewers to fall in love with the genre. For like the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse puts the fiction before the science. It cares more about its characters and the ethical dilemmas they are confronted with than it does about the science which, nonetheless, is successfully welded atop this foundation of character. It is a futuristic war shaped by a Wikileaks-style debate over the control of information and the ambition of institutions to do as they please. In this, it cannot but be relatable to our masses.

Winning work. Occasionally a bit too preoccupied with gore, but in every other respect extraordinary. (5/5 Stars)