IF YOU HAVE spent any time reading or watching science fiction, you have almost certainly encountered stories in which humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and is capable of traveling relatively easily between star systems. These stories tend to treat the mechanics of interstellar travel as long solved, often via dubious gimmicks (warp drives, hyperspace) that hand-wave away the problems of interstellar migration. Star Trek, Star Wars, and even the Alien films all take place in futures where traveling the galaxy is as accessible via spaceship as Earth is by plane or by boat: Trips can take some time, but fundamentally there’s little question about whether or not people can traverse the distance between stars. Yet few science fiction tales have attempted to answer the question these easily traversed galaxies imply: How exactly did we make the leap from our solar system to the stars beyond?
That is the question the series of stories called The Expanse, much of which was adapted into a six-season television series that aired on SyFy and Amazon Prime Video, sought to answer. Over the course of nine novels and a handful of novellas, authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, writing under the pen name James S.A. Corey, took human beings from the solar system to the galaxy beyond.
The authors trace our species’s arduous journey from Earth to Mars to the asteroid belt, and eventually to a vast array of new worlds. They offer a vision of humanity’s expansionary potential situated somewhere between the hard limits of a solar-only civilization and the magical ease of convenient interstellar travel. It’s
