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The Expanse…spoilers.
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Ricardo
Posts: 14806
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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 RE: The Expanse…spoilers. (in reply to mrstwinkle)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mrstwinkle
Great but very confused TV series. The books were, very simply, bad.
Having watched it all, Camina is the central character. Not beardy skinny boy.
Not confused, but the viewer needs to really pay attention. I assume you realize the on screen drummer is an amalgam of two people at least, that play different roles in the book. In book 7 it would be problematic for the time frame if they are only ONE person…and another reason they won’t be making a 7th season is that time frame issue (everybody is much older at the start). Camina is important for sure, but the way all the characters develop was really unique IMO. I hated Amos at first, and then he became a super beloved character later on. There are details that are easy to miss, upon a second pass I noticed things that tie together smoothly…in other words the continuity is VERY well done, unlike most other sci-fi dramas.
I was hoping to discuss details and not defend the show or books, but I know opinions are gonna come either way. The reason I enjoyed the show is because it played out more or less how I envisioned the human race realistically colonizing the solar system post excellent films like Contact or 2001. (If you hate those movies then of course you might be ambivalent about the Expanse). For me that “growing past the adolescent” stage of humanity in order to enter into some type of Galactic fraternity of technological species at large, has always been an important day dream. It was frankly very fun to watch that play out very closely to how I imagined it.
In all honesty the first couple episodes are NOT that interesting or even entertaining, they rather are just setting the stage for the adventure. It is really in Season 3 that the story gets interesting and exciting. If not for my deep interest in the time period in question, I might have gotten bored and turned it off too. When I was young I hated 2001 for example, but today I see it as a masterpiece.
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CD's and transcriptions available here:
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Date Jan. 24 2022 3:24:30
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Ricardo
Posts: 14806
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: The Expanse…spoilers. (in reply to Ricardo)
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Spoilers!!!!!!!!!!!
Well I finished book 9. It has a decent ending, meaning the decisions made at the conclusion were believable and in line with the characters involved… but unfortunately, all that cool realistic science and feeling of believability that the TV show pulled me in with, sort of flew out the window in the final book. I mean I was still all in the game with Book 8 which I felt was very well written, exciting and disturbing all at once. But all of a sudden I got a feeling in book 9 of redundant violent characters (relentless Tanaka was a little over the top), and almost superhero comic book fantasy kicking into overdrive, starting with the Mork and Mindy Egg ship that used what seems like from the verbal description as your stereotypical “warp drive” … as if the writers suddenly needed magic to move the plot along. Come on, if the Proto builders had that tech (power to warp space and travel, what had to have been FTL since that is what warp tech implies….circumventing the c restrictions of mass increase at high velocity), then they did not even need the Ring gates at all.
And all the unanswered questions I was ok with throughout the show, suddenly are left unanswered? Why were the rings so damn big? What where their bodies like? How could they “borrow” energy from the higher dimension to power the gates before even building one? Was that diamond their home world? If not, which of the 1300 was it? Why did they destroy solar systems, because of the bullets? Who set the neutron star booby trap and how??
I know a lot is meant for interpretation, but some things had vague answers…Or badly answered as interpretations from the single biologist of the human race permitted to interpret the “dream sequence” poetic descriptions of the ring builders??? I was not cool with that. I was perfectly ok with the ring entities not being fully explained, that was fine. They are “outside” so that is fine. The analogy of our super biologist of a us being a virus hurting the large entity body (inner space typical concept) was fine, but still, her singular interpretation. Where are the real physicists in the story??? 
The epilogue was fun, even if super cheesy but it fulfilled expectations for the Amos character that were built up since the start of the show. I saw it coming of course but it was still fun.
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CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date Feb. 1 2022 19:01:02
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: The Expanse…spoilers. (in reply to Arash)
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quote:
The three-body-problem trillogy
I enjoyed that trilogy as well. Some fun ideas to play around with, though indeed a rather bleak view of the universe. The high point for me was the end of book 2.
The last sci-fi I've watched was the 2021 Dune remake. I liked it quite a bit. Some changes of course, some for the better (some of the content of Paul's visions) and others for the worse (Jessica a rather weak character compared to what she is in the book; Arrakeen for some reason turned into a dead city (I noticed Villeneuve did the same thing in Blade Runner 2049. Compared to Ridley Scott's movie, everything was just empty and dead)), but overall I was sold on it, enough to look forward to part 2.
That and the movie Space Sweepers, which was largely unremarkable. A few colorful characters (but drowned out by the sheer amount of bad acting from the rest of the cast) and I appreciated the fact that a variety of languages were spoken in the same movie. But the plot was boring and predictable. Like those movies where 10 minutes in, even if nothing has happened yet, you've already guessed that the surprise ending will be something about Nazi gold...
I've heard some good things about the series For All Mankind, which posits a world in which the USSR landed on the Moon first and the space race continues. But I haven't had the chance to watch it yet.
I tried watching The Expanse when it first came out, but I didn't manage to make it through the first few episodes. Based on the conversations here I might give it another try, or perhaps try reading the books.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date May 19 2022 14:56:52
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: The Expanse…spoilers. (in reply to Ricardo)
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Finished Cibola Burn.
To get my opinions on the books out of the way: book 1 was great. 2 and 3 are good but start to feel a bit repetitive, since many of the plot mechanics are the same as in book 1 (someone does a false-flag attack, someone is looking for a single person across the entire solar system, etc.). Book 4 marks a low point. Uncharitably I'd call it Riddick but boring. They also made their universe feel small by bringing back both Havelock and Basia, as if there were just a few dozen people in the world and they keep on running into each other. So, boo book 4, but other than that, an enjoyable read so far. Now:
- So far I can't really speculate on the whole rings subspace thing. It's just something that's there and that's that. The only thing I know for sure about these aliens is that Apple didn't make their machines. They still work after billions of years when I can't even get my fúcking laptop to last a decade... What I don't really understand is the logistics of seeding the protomolecule on a planet. The problem is the fact that they apparently didn't find anything on Phoebe except the protomolecule. My thinking is that it had to be either a manned mission or there were at least machines and whatnot on Phoebe. For starters, the protomolecule can't drive itself. And if you're going to just shoot it at a planet, you're not going to use a 200km-diameter rock that'll wipe out all organic material upon arrival, since that would defeat the purpose of sending the protomolecule in the first place. Plus you'd probably want something there that could distinguish between forms of life, to avoid the kind of accident that happen on Eros (imagine the same thing happening to a civilization far more advanced... they could've accidentally started a war doing that). Also, you could always just load up organic material on the thing before launch to avoid that kind of mishap, no? But assuming it was a manned mission or that there were at least machines on Phoebe, why didn't they find anything? Maybe they did and it'll come up in later books with one faction having secretly developed some weapon or something? Just seems strange. Also, part of me wonders if Phoebe "landed" exactly where it was supposed to, and the idea that it was aiming for Earth is just the protagonists being self-centered.
- The Belter creole is garbage. It reads like they just glued together random words they looked up on Google. Da this man ein Kartoffeln pour qu'il stop hablar. As Marco Twain geschrieben hat, callar sei mieux than quitar Duden that tú baka desu, sabes. I gather for the show they had someone with experience conlanging come up with something better, so hopefully the language in the show is better than what's in the books. Still, I don't find the idea of a single creole shared by dozens of millions of people across the outer solar system to be convincing at all. They probably didn't explicitly think about it, but the model they're following is Schuchardt's monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles. He postulated that all Atlantic creoles came from one local pidgin, "West African Pidgin Portuguese", and that it then spread as slaves were sold and deported to the Americas. But he had to contend with the fact that Atlantic creoles come in all shapes and colors, so he then imagined various mechanisms that could explain the observed differences. The authors of the Expanse point to this by saying the Belter creole was the language of "the first settlers of the Belt". But even assuming a monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles is plausible (and that's a big if), you still end up with a wide variety of creoles, and not just the one. So, from my perspective, there's no reason why Belters from X place should speak the same language as Belters from Y place. The end result is that they're all a bit flattened out as characters. The only metric to differentiate a Belter from another Belter is just how much they hate the inner planets, ranging from fairly robust hatred to burn-motherfúckers-burn. But culturally, linguistically, etc., they're all the same. A limited analogy, but it's kind of like if you wrote a story set during the Cold War, and wherever the protagonist goes in the Third World, "they speak Third Worlder here". So dunno, I'd personally have imagined a lot more complexity, and potentially conflict, between different areas of the Belt. Or if they do all share the same creole, I'd need a good explanation as to how something so unlikely ended up occurring.
- FWIW, I'd totally go on Basic and just play guitar all day.
Anyway, happy holidays. Live largo und prosper kudasai, roflcopter sa sa.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Dec. 21 2022 15:58:40
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Maybe it'll pay off in the end, but if the rest of the season is like what I've seen up until now, I doubt all that many people will be clamoring for a second season. 
