I'm kind of surprised how many nerdy people I know who have never watched this show. It is by far the best (maybe only?) hard sci-fi TV show ever, and almost every episode is better than any hard sci-fi movie ever made.
If AC Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were alive they'd be heaping praise on this show for getting so many of the technical details exactly right.
I don't know if I'd say the get the technical details exactly right, as there are some concessions to story-telling over physics - the (probably) impossibly efficient fusion drives, and the protomolecule is kinda magic sometimes, but it get is right enough, and way more so than any other sci-fi show I've seen.
It's like Mass Effect. The mass effect phenomena is basically space magic, but most of the rest of the lore is realistic (aside from a few things like the quantum communicators in the third game).
Eh... Mass Effect is fairly soft sci-fi and more of classic space opera.
All these things happen in Mass Effect:
Sounds in space, spaceships bunched way too close together, impossibly slow projectiles for space (especially the classic "blob of light/plasma thingy" traveling at what appears to be subsonic speeds), giant 18th-century infantry-style spaceship firing lines, in general heavy reliance on "spaceships as just extensions of naval warfare" trope, all alien communication neatly glossed over with universal translation, nearly universally bipedal humanoid aliens, etc.
None of these are bad things! Mass Effect is simply much more similar in tradition to something like Star Wars or Star Trek than the Expanse.
There is one scene where Avasarala comes aboard the Roccinante and is dressed in a white textured jumpsuit straight out of Mass Effect. The camera lingers slightly too long on her, it is a clear homage imo.
Agree - I love the show but the two nits I have with it are the sounds in space (engines/guns most notably, although it makes for a better show) and the fact that they can't film in zero-G.
The weightless thing is obviously understandable but it's the kind of thing where you can't unsee the things they do to convince you there is no gravity (magnets everywhere!)
- Lights inside helmets to light up a person's face is a pretty dumb thing when you think about it, but it makes complete sense in a tv series, as you definitely want to see the actor's face.
- Transparent/Glass tablets & phones is still a complete mystery to me how this could be useful in any way... other than it "looks cool".
> Lights inside helmets to light up a person's face is a pretty dumb thing when you think about it
Only if you are doing EVA astronomy and need pitch black darkness to see stuff outside. Because you can light up someone's face enough and still not interfere with their activities.
Otherwise – it would be important to be able to see the other person's face, both to interact with them, and to gauge their well-being.
Their phones are not exactly transparent, they are "holographic". They can project images larger than their own size. Same as many screens depicted in the show.
Are lights in a helmet dumb? Being able to see companion's facial expressions while not critical would be absolutely useful in day-to-day life in space - TV production reasons aside.
On the transparent glass phones: "looks cool" is reason enough for most any consumer product. I haven't read the series, so I don't know if there is some lore explanation somewhere -- but --- if the technology is lying around as some component of a space habitat AND it looks cool, yeah, that tech is definitely going in a phone.
The actual mechanics of phones aren’t really explored in the books, which I kind of like. Going into the physical design of them would be like a novel set in 2021 going into detail about the design of an iPhone.
They’re also always referred to as hand terminals, which is so much of a better name for the devices we carry around and very rarely use as phones.
if you have lights on one side of a piece of glass and the black void of space on the other, it turns the visor into a mirror for the wearer. not very practical.
It's not just about looking cool. It's tough to make a film where characters are interacting with a screen or drawing on a whiteboard because the director usually wants to show the actor's face along with the screen so we can see their reactions. Which is why so often you see shows where actors draw on clear glass whiteboards even though no real office would ever have them. Likewise transparent phones: It's an unrealistic moviemaking concession that audiences mostly tolerate.
See through devices don't make much sense. But, the Expanse has omnipresent person tracking through their profile and camera systems. The computers of a ship or station can be queried to find a person. There seems to be a system wide registry of people and ships. Each ship and station has a copy of both. The whole system makes me think of tests of blockchain based vessel registries.
There’s a few nice touches like that. Fairly frequently there’s references to many different “feeds”, which every time makes me think of the entire solar system clustering around subreddits.
This is only a real problem with external shots. And only some of them. If you were as close to engine exhaust as some of the shots - assuming you were not incinerated - you'd definitely hear something as the exhaust impacted you.
There's also budget constraints, they can't accurately portray things every time. Although we know the producers know about the issues.
Examples: the first belter we see is more accurate to what they should look like than subsequent ones. Taller, and more frail.
Coriolis effects as Mueller was pouring his drink.
More recently, Avasarala pouring liquor while at the Moon. Even though the actors don't look like they are in the Moon (because in real life they are not), the producers will waste some CGI budget from time to time to remind us that – "hey! we know this is supposed to be the Moon. Look!"
one issue I have is that despite being on the moon or one of the planetoids in the belt - they don't have that shuffling walk due to gravity being a fraction of a 1g.
This criticism doesn't really make sense to me. We're watching through the lens of an invisible space camera with some sort of amazing lighting rig to make things look better. Why can't that space camera also have a laser microphone and sound synthesizer which makes things make noise to provide audio cues that the audience can latch on to? Alternately: the gun and engine noise comes from the same place that the background music comes from, and nobody questions that.
> Why can't that space camera also have a laser microphone and sound synthesizer which makes things make noise to provide audio cues that the audience can latch on to
That's the excuse provided by EVE Online. The lore is that they have extremely cheap "camera" drones. And that the neural interface synthesizes sounds (and other senses) to increase your awareness.
The Expanse does sounds inside ships just fine. You hear your own ship firing, you don't hear others. And whenever actors (as opposed to a disembodied camera) are in space, they don't hear anything.
Tbf, more than half the time they're either accelerating, decelerating or are in a centrifuge. Ships are designed with the floors towards the engine, so there's actual gravity in the first two cases, and stations are using centripedal force.
Wouldn't our science just be magic to our ancestors, too? I hope in 100 years there are things that seem impossible to me now and I enjoy when the fiction I consume reflects that.
Yeah I know a few trekkies who hated The Expanse, but love ST Discovery. I watched half of season 1 of STD and had to switch it off. I've never hated a TV show so much as STD.
The Expanse on the other hand is the best SciFi since Battlestar Galactica.
Edit - to expand on why I hate STD so much, it's the completely unlikeable characters. I just couldn't root for a single one of them.
I have to agree with you on Discovery. The characters are really unlikeable. The actors aren't good or at least, not at their best (I absolutely adore Michelle Yeoh, but she really doesn't shine here). The storylines are absurd, but that's par for the course for this kind of TV show -- it's the characters which really break this. The main character Michael is almost insufferable.
There's also that hilarious moment in S2 where a supporting character dies and everyone goes "oh no, she was my best friend!" and gets a teary send-off, but we -- the audience -- barely knew her and she didn't really speak with anyone and there was no evidence she was actually friends with anyone before. Like bad writing 101, almost an in-joke by the writers.
Btw they did similar mistake in the reverse, where some no name crew character dies and the surviving crew stars are completely oblivious to it, "yeah whatever, we do not really need him, let's move on". I like how one ST fan characterized it, classic trek always cared about people, but STD just razes through people's deaths as unimportant plot points.
Trekkie here (more or less). I like The Orville better than Discovery. Discovery is down-right disappointing and stupid. Picard is better than Discovery, but still didn't live up to my expectations.
You're probably right about Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse being the best hard sci-fi.
It's hard to beat the episodes/stories in the earlier Star Trek shows. The Twilight Zone was able to pull off a faithful modern reboot, why can't Star Trek?
(Someone else mentioned Planetes further down in the comments. That is also good hard sci-fi.)
It took me awhile to discover it, but what a great show. Personally, and it probably has to do with when I grew up, Star Trek TNG is my favorite sci-fi (though not necessarily 'hard' sci-fi) show.
Picard was disappointing to me because it was boring. It had a few nice elements but fundamentally it felt like a four-episode story stretched out to fill 10 (or however many it was).
> The Twilight Zone was able to pull off a faithful modern reboot, why can't Star Trek?
It can be done by the right people, see Enterprise which had the trekky heart and was good on start (it did have increasing problems in later seasons).
Trek is in wrong hands now. Some commentators say the main showrunners actually hate the previous classic Star Trek, and they are trying hard to revision it.
STD is so eager to hit you over the head with “see how HORRIBLE society is?!?!?”
The Expanse actually has its own world with its own problems that isn’t just a shallow mirror of the writers view of today. Also much less melodrama, although not none.
It seems STD is trying really hard to push certain ideaologies, especially around diversity - but it feels so "fake" as if they're trying too hard. The Expanse on the other hand has a diverse cast but it feels natural and realistic.
Very fake, forced and the overall script/narrative is pathetic with some minor bright moments. STD looks to me to be more like a political bidding/propaganda piece than a science fiction TV show.
For me, it's the focus on the lead character Space Jesus Michael Burnham, who has to be in every damn plot point, often whisper-talking, sometimes crying, and we know squat about most of the crew. After three seasons, I don't even know all the bridge crew names, let alone their motivations.
And lest we forget: She's Spock's sister. Who was never mentioned once in the entire previous Star Trek canon. And now every episode is about her. Riiiiight.
I'd go so far as to say the Expanse beats Battlestar Galactica. It's a classic for sure but too bogged down by the single self contained episode format that made it less enjoyable for me to watch.
Whoa, shots fired (joke). Seriously, I think when such a show reaches certain level of quality one does not need to pronounce one better than the other. They are so good they are worth your while. Of course, if we focus on specific aspects, you may be right. BSG was dark and very serious, paranoid/survival kind of stuff. Expanse is much easier to watch, you know nothing too bad is going to happen to main characters.
Right there with you. I loathe STD. It reads like bad Star Trek fanfic written by people who never watched any real Star Trek.
I could go on a long rant here but I'll just mention one of the ultra-ridiculous plot points of STD: The ship runs on mold. Seriously -- not dilithium crystals, but mold. They even imply that the very fabric of subspace is -- a fungus.
The first season is a bit slow, I only got hooked on my second try. Which is a bit odd as the first book is quite fast-paced.
I wouldn't exactly call it hard sci-fi, but it at least makes an effort to keep some parts realistic, with the obvious exception of major plot elements like the protomolecule and all stuff derived from it. You can certainly nitpick many details about how gravity is handled, they make an effort to explain it without resorting to magic, but in the end simulating microgravity just isn't feasible on a TV budget.
What's also great here is that it's not just technically right, but it doesn't ignore the human element: we squabble, fight and make up, and that's a key part of the world they've constructed.
I had been thinking a great deal about the joke which was left unfinished early in S5 about what a Belter, a Martian, and an Earther would drink. I initially thought that it was never going to be completed so I was kind of happy when they did and was rather let down by the joke.
That wasn't the point of it. Delgado started telling the joke before the rocks fell and finished it well afterward. You might think that his views on Belters had changed after they attacked Earth, but the punchline reinforces that he thought that all Belters were complete trash before all of that.
Showing the human element is something that they do very well, and a lot of it is a thin projection of what we, as humans, often do between different races, countries, classes, and beliefs. It's somehow easier to discuss when it's Belters, Earthers, and Martians instead of black, white, etc, even though they really represent the same thing.
If memory serves, he finishes this joke after Avasarala tells him she still wants to work with him and he looks at her like, "why on earth would you want to do that??". He knows he's damaged goods and she still trusts him anyway.
He follows up with, "That used to be funnier" putting him into the 'self-aware wolves' category at least.
Yeah, I think it shows what humans of right now would be like in space, if we had the same technical progression, rather than imagining how we would be instead.
Babylon 5 has been fully remastered, by the way, available for purchase or on HBO Max. Just dropped last week, and it’s excellent. The previous DVD remaster was an abomination.
Warner Bros spent 6 years on the new remaster. It was reportedly a labor of love by those involved.
can you elaborate on how the remastering affects the quality? what do you see in the remastered version that you didn't see in the older version or the original?
I haven't watched the HBO Max version yet, just seen some comparison vids and shots, but the DVD conversion handled the special effects shots very poorly. The original show was broadcast in SD 4:3 which is what the effects were rendered at. The DVD conversion went to 16:9 widescreen, since that's what the film was shot at, but then decided to get 16:9 effects shots by zooming in and cropping the already-low-SD-resolution renders. So it's now basically half resolution, and then run that through an interlaced DVD and put it on a big HDTV, and it looks awful. The effects shots also include a lot of conversations and other shots with people, since they used quite a few virtual sets.
From the comparison shots I've seen of the new version, they kept everything 4:3, and instead of cropping the effects shots, did a pretty decent job upscaling them instead. So it's not HD quality like if they were rendered in HD, but at least it's not sub-broadcast-quality anymore.
I knew Ron Thornton a little bit back when he was doing the CGI for B5 because of his use of the Amiga and Lightwave. I didn't know he had died until I saw this article. He was an amazing artist.
I only saw it when it first came out but IMO it's a show you need to know what you're going to get. There are certainly things to strongly recommend it but, at the same time, (just) some of the acting is pretty weak, the CGI was innovative mostly in the context of working within a small budget, and the pacing/plotting towards the end was disrupted because the show didn't know if it would be renewed.
Ijon Tichy's scratching his head, wondering if he's Hard Sci-Fi - as too the Ijon Tichy from ten minutes in the future who's just popped in and started eating the pancakes he'd just finished eating.
It depends if we're talking Solaris the movie or the Solaris the book. The book makes it clear that the ocean is reading the minds of the space ship inhabitants somehow and attempting communications with them by recreating familiar objects through neutrinos that they can somehow physically interact with. Subsequently the book is all about an attempt to establish communication with the ocean while at the same time enduring its phantoms, with the end result being that humans are unable to decipher the intentions of the ocean or communicate with it in any way.
Expanse is more along the lines of "geopolitics in space" with the protomolecule being a MacGuffin to drive the plot along and create space zombies and wormholes. Which isn't to be derisive, as I find it very entertaining, but I don't feel like it's delving deep into the scientific or philosophical ramifications of first contact.
Howabout Gundam? Angsty teen/preteen protagonist trope can get annoying, but I'd classify a lot of UC Gundam as pretty "hard" SF. Granted there are some deus ex machina type elements to it (psychic newtypes, Minovsky particles, etc.).
Gundam was always about societies experiencing large-scale changes that no individual person has a handle on, and the struggles of people who try to make a difference anyway. In that sense, it's comparable to The Expanse, and the "magical" elements serve more or less the same purpose.
Planetes, on the other hand, isn't much like either of these. Its subject matter is intensely personal, and even when the characters occasionally get involved in high-stakes situations, it's less to do with changes in society (which occur much more slowly) and more to do with someone turning their small-scale private difficulties into everybody else's problem. The political elements intrude for a while and disappear again, and I don't remember them nearly as well as the bits about a lost watch, or a marriage proposal.
In a nutshell, if Gundam and The Expanse need magic because they're larger-than-life, Planetes has no use for it, because it's exactly-the-same-size-as-life.
I've been into Sci-Fi as long as I can remember and I watched The Expanse but found it quite dull most of the time. I continued to watch it only because "it's Sci-Fi".
I feels like the actual story is quite short but is being stretched between the first and last episode with repetitive tropes. It's too bad because it does have more potential.
It's funny that you mention that, I grew up reading Clarke's books, along with Asimov, Frederik Pohl and many others. I've also read The Expanse and by the end of the last book I hated every word of it, I just can't make myself watch the TV series.
Why, you may ask? The behavior of human characters in The Expanse is... terrible. They fight each other, everybody has their own agenda, they behave irrationally. Case in point: in the second book (as far as I remember) an alien ship appears in the Solar system - clearly a hostile force. Earth and Mars send soldiers on the ship and what do they do? They start fighting each other. No, I do not want to believe that humans would behave that way. If you read Clarke's books, when facing the new and possibly dangerous things humans behave logically, calmly. You do not see human vs human conflict in Rama, Childhood's End, The Fountains of Paradise, Space odyssey, Sands of Mars or almost any other of his books. It's about exploration, human unity, positivism, and there is nothing of that kind in the Expanse. I could not find a single character in the Expanse that behaves in the way Clarke's characters would. I apologize for the harsh words but I refuse to believe that Clarke would write such an abomination.
And no, it is not just the Expanse's writers, I see it everywhere nowadays, it seems that the writers nowadays need to insert human conflict so they introduce whatever irrational behavior leads to it.
> everybody has their own agenda, they behave irrationally
Just like real life?
There's a difference between being irrational versus being self-centered.
> No, I do not want to believe that humans would behave that way
Humanity is currently facing a potential extinction level threat due to climate change and you have plenty of people fighting one another and making emotional - versus rational - arguments.
the dialogue sometimes feels like it's disproportionately characters barking or hissing at each other, even if they're in a very formal or very familiar environment where that level of rudeness and overt hostility seems out of place.
> getting so many of the technical details exactly right
I'm with you.
It bothers me when people are given sci fi on the hard spectrum but then debate 'how hard it really is' for the purpose of defining then diminishing the value of the material; feels very self congratulatory.
Everyone who praises the expanse's 'hardness' are just as aware that protomolecule is space magic.
Space magic has its place but the expanse also offers a level of hardness I appreciate outside the narrative elements requiring the space magic.
I think its an important discussion in any talk of scifi to point out where the lens is callibrated with regard to hardness resolution.
Turns "expanse is hard scifi" debate on its head by simply changing that statement to "I like the level of scifi hardness in the expanse".
My nephew was reading a book and a character in it built a metal detector out of a radio in a survival scenario.
Due to my interests my nephew asked me if it was possible; if 'he could do that'.
I explained that i suppose you could construct a device to detect eddy currents out of the components of a radio, but it would be so terrible and unreliable that itd fail to detect any metal in any meaningful survival sense.
My nephew was satisfied with the answer, he honestly was uninterested in if it would 'work' but rather 'how probable' it was.
You could tell he was inspired to learn more about the topics that subjectively could allow someone know how to do that regardless of its objective viability.
So, the story could have cut ahead to after its been magically built off screen or could magically source parts from the devices without the actual necessary base components to achieve the conversion ignoring the whole radio aspect or the character could reasonably source components that "magically" works well enough to allow their knowledge to save them (the level this story choose) or the character could sit down and read through a data sheet and spend screen time soldering components to pcbs then accept they wasted all that time, and narrative space, because its an untenable goal given what they have to work with.
I think there are arguments for each of these levels depending on the narrative's slated goals, and being accessible to a broader audience is an important one of these goals.
I feel the further you move down that hard ladder the smaller the audience becomes and leaves less of the 'fi' element of sci fi for you to work with narratively.
I love ben eater's 6502 series and find it extremely entertaining, but does anyone expect that level of detail in a sci fi television show? Is that the end goal of these hardness debates?
I simply appreciate where the Expanse chooses to push that line into the esoteric, and yes even in the other direction of space magic, while still remaining accessible to a broader audience allowing people with less technical knowledge to be inspired to pursue expanding their knowledge within those fields.
There was a time when Star Trek's mobile computers would be considered as negatively affecting its "hardness score", ala "these handheld devices are ridiculous! computers are the size of shipping containers"
So does that mean that Star Trek is "harder" now without even changing its material content simply because it inspired people to build those very devices seemingly run on 'space magic'?
“Exactly like that, but smaller” is less interesting and less hard than projecting completely new things within plausible bounds of known physics, or speculating new things that might require new kinds of physics but some plausible Levenshtein distance from present theory.
I guess part of what I am saying is that when I was younger I gained value from scifi with a wide range of 'hardness' without knowing the physics, and even now, that I've come to understand the physics, I still find value in the same.
But I've found the more I know about something the more I know about all the stuff I have yet to know.
I feel the 'protomolecule' plays pretty well within these "plausible bounds" of uknown physics.
I think it's a fine metric but how or where you apply the function is subjective.
There is potential for issues even taking this route though.
There is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard is musing on Fermat's Last Theorem; a yet still unsolved problem in mathematics in the 24th century.
To the character the idea of solving it, even in a far future, was implausible. Yet when we watch it now it plays anachronistic because we are the 'more educated more informed viewer from 30 years later' who know Fermat's Last Theorem was solved by Andrew Wiles in 1994.
Sorry but you can't call something that has sounds in space hard sci-fi. Overall they do a good job but to me no sounds in a vacuum is a key marker of hard sci-fi.
If you pay attention, it's actually much more subtly done than that.
The engine whooshing noises are more like what you'd hear on board, if you were on board. If they left those sounds out, the conveyed sensation of motion would lose a lot of its impact.
But consider how the characters touch helmets in order to communicate when their radios are down, or when they want to communicate privately.
Or consider Naomi's trial on board the Chetzemoka most recently. She needed to examine the ship spec plate to find out the air volume so she could calculate how many trips she could make to the unpressurized parts of the ship; she marks the number of trips on a wall, which doubles as a narrative device to demonstrate how many trips she made. Note also the way she touched her helmet to the hull in order to hear the radio broadcast while she was in the unpressurized area.
Some of my favourite parts have been the battles, the way they demonstrate the harshness of space and the way the lack of gravity confounds expectations. The way the railgun punched through multiple walls of the Donnager, into open space, and the rush to patch up the holes. Or when Prax and Amos were in the cargo bay and some tools came lose, and they flew around the bay based on the ship's manouevers - or rather, tried to stay still while the ship moved around them.
If AC Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were alive they'd be heaping praise on this show for getting so many of the technical details exactly right.