If you like physics… that alone is enough to start The Expanse. I’m in my little pandemic bubble and echo chamber, so I’ve been watching this show with jaw-dropped amazement, and isolated such that I keep conspiratorially suggesting it’s far better than most sci-fi, and actually stunning myself thinking it’s really quite better than Battlestar Galactica, but I am in my own confirmation bias, in the heat of the moment. That being said, we can have nuance! It’s not been taken from us, just quietly lost for a bit. Both are quite “epic” as a space opera tragedy, but they tell different stories with different intents, in using the lens of science fiction.
The writing for Expanse blows BSG out of the water. The books, and the way the production of the show was handled, we’re looking at the most scientifically accurate representation of the fiction of space science in the history of media. Very few works are created that will pass DeGrasse Tyson’s muster and incoming insults. I will say, watching the science within The Expanse has put the final nail in the coffin for my entire history with the Star Wars universe. It’s made Star Wars precisely what it was… a silly boyish fantasy about a princess. So, The Expanse *may* have ruined science fiction for me, to some extent. Sagan’s Contact did a wonderful job, and other entries that we have to wait and see (Hollywood production hell) also deal with real world science in a fantastic way… The Forever War, Snowcrash, Daemon, etc.
It’s very likely possible that some of the characters on BSG were acted better, and although some Expanse acting was called “wooden”, I just think they’re sleepy, and watching (mid season 4) Amos’ arc is likely going to be one of the best I’ve ever seen. Just guessing, no spoilers. But The Expanse was always about the infrastructure that humans inhabited, vs the deep and emotionally complex individual lives of specific characters. It’s about the interaction of complex systems with humans being moved around like chess pieces.
Conversely, BSG dealt with complex ethical questions about what it means to be a human, what it means to be artificial, and what is the intersection of artifice inheriting humanity, versus where do humans lose their own humanity to become artifice? When does the struggle for existence provide challenges so great, we humans become what we fear, loathe, or despise? BSG dove into emotional, spiritual, and existential notions of the human condition. It was how to we maintain our humanity when we’ve lost almost all of it, and what it means to exist happily as an individual, whether robot-human, enhanced, broken, lost, lonely, confused, **as an individual**, no matter your walk of life, race, species, gender.
But The Expanse is just taking everything that makes modern day political and social humans, and extrapolating that at the speed with which we and technology are advancing. BSG was more of a metaphor for the human condition, while Expanse is more of a time-traveling diorama on infrastructural, economic, and political notions of human systems, and pressing fast forward in a very grounded manner. It’s also relatively objective and non-partisan, vs the cynical digs of capitalism run amok in the Alien or Blade Runner universe, where the monopolistic “corporation” de facto manages and governs the dystopic cyberpunk populace. Yes, Expanse is extremely similar to the universe that garnered Weyland-Yutani’s brutal corporate misuse and devaluation of human beings, but with a far less aggressive subtext of “Huge corporations will drown human potential forever”. The Expanse is almost non-partisan in a measured and almost optimistic view of the human condition driving and controlling these same capitalistic systems in achieving interconnected balance, vs accepting “The Military-Industrial-Corporate-Government complex is a boot stamping on a face forever” like in Ridley Scott’s universes (who, by and large, was the main influence on almost every cinematic dystopic and cynical future sci-fi reality, but that is arguable).
The Expanse just feels like a time machine showing us where the logical end game will be for the systems at play, vs the humans that exist within them as almost incidental characters as part of moving the systems forward. It’s obviously far more realistic and rooted in our own propensity within that millennia long struggle of seeking equitable concessions & balance vs annihilation and self-destruction. Obviously, “Aliens wiping out our race” is far more traditional to the 50s popcorn film version of sci-fi, but the philosophy of Battlestar’s subtext was a real game changer in scifi, and was profoundly human. The Expanse is a bus ride into where humans will be within the systems that dominate our lives, in a few short years. I guess we can look at The Expanse as a complex but hopeful outcome for our species, struggling to agree.
Both are wonderful, and important in their own right. One focused on the very small, and one the very big. And there’s room for both… just don’t miss either one.