Only on book three, so far there's a Jewish inventor of the space drive, a foul mouthed but wise pajeet grandma politician with her soy husband, strong independent mongrel women, south east Asian doctor looking for his daughter, interracial lesbian pastor, oh and foolish/violent huwite men. shitskins diversity IN SPACE!
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I liked the early Expanse books. After.. 4 (maybe 3) they get worse, each book worse than the previous. At one point they do a time skip just because they want to ditch the remaining white characters. The authors were infected with critical wokeness, post 2011. Probably trying to jockey for Hugo awards.
If you want more fun space sci-fi do the John Ringo books. One series starts with A Hymn Before Battle, this is an Earth is invaded by aliens kinda thing, with other elements secondary. Though, personally I liked his series that started with Live Free or Die. Earth gets sucked up into a galactic conflict at the same time as finding out they aren't alone. The main protag is a bit unbelievable, but it's more of a macro view of story than micro at some point.
I have everything Ringo wrote, in hardback. Read them all numerous times.
Unfortunately, he's run into medical issues, I don't think he's going to finish any of the several series desperately waiting on new books.
I can also recommend the Wardogs Inc series, about a space mercenary company. The universe has several very interesting premises, namely with regards to the usability of technology in warfare.
I will check that out. Thanks.
No problem. I believe Battlesuit Bastards is the first of the bunch.
I just started a hymm before battle, and one of the alien race is incapable of fighting, in charge of the lifetime loans (financial slavery) of their federation and have disproportional influences in every aspect of federation, who wanted us to fight their wars for nearly free because we're supposedly on their enemy's next list. Where have I heard this before 🤔
Hmm.... ahahaha
Epstein didn't kill himself. He just yeeted himself to ludicrous speed.
I watched the series than read the books, I did see a diverse cast but was explained well in universe so wasn't an issue. Plus just because of the actress that played her level of snark, she was one of my favourite characters.
Number one for me was Amos, most of the bad guys were Asian in the story, if not other (spoiler if I go into that)
The Expanse is a weird one. Yeah all that happens, but also Earth is a gibs me dat shithole (with no excuses made for it), leftist terrorists are rightfully destroyed by cosmic forces, and women continuously have the worst fucking judgement.
i will hear no disrespect of avasarala in this house. she is my based chainsmoker grandma.
Expanse was one of the last pieces of popular media I very, very grudgingly admitted to liking (I watched the series; they included everything you mentioned), but you're not wrong. It was clear there was a forced diversity agenda and cringey feminist ideas of assertive heroines. This seemed to get worse as the show went on and I couldn't be bothered to watch the final season.
Still, earlier on, it does have something going for it. Hard to pinpoint what it is. I kept telling people how lame I found it and mocking it, only to find myself watching through it attentively season on season for a while. In the end I gave up and accepted that I kind of liked it (until I gave up watching). Regardless of how clumsy and cringe the low points are, I think it's one of the few pieces of popular TV to ever treat sci fi concepts fairly well. The Eros incident towards end of S1 and the return to Eros in S2 were very memorable, conceptually and visually.
Sci fi literature is, generally speaking, 100x better than sci fi TV or cinema even on the low end. Still, if it's a candidate for Netflix adaptation in the first place, chances are it's a mid novel as novel series go. Try Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep if you haven't.
The Expanse TV show is really good if you just skip over any time Naomi is talking. Her story doesn't matter and she's 80%-90% of The Message (also skip over the lesbian pastor's black wife, but you'll instinctively want to do that anyway).
Speaking of which, somebody should make a Sponsor Block thing to skip over woke shit. Queue up Expanse and it automatically skips over Naomi and lesbo wife instead of manually hitting right arrow.
Does VLC have like a skiplist file it loads automatically like subtitles? That would be awesome.
The Asian doctor was cool. The Indian president played by that real-life-Iranian chain-smoker was fun. Plenty of good normal white characters in the mix and character you don't know are good/bad just by their race. Honestly it's worth watching just for Amos, he's a real badass.
Other than Naomi and lesbo it's really not bad other than the low production value from SciFi seasons.
The book series was suggested to me once because they said it was like Game of Thrones in Space
Whoever said that is an idiot.
I picked up the first book a long, long time ago, read through it, and then promptly tossed it aside and forgot about it. The entire thing read as if it was some sort of paint-by-numbers sci-fi series with nothing really new or creative about it.
Imagine my surprise years later when normies decide to go apeshit over it in television form...
Come to think, I did the same thing with GoT - picked up the first book, read through it, then tossed it aside. Huh.
The TV series hit a specific market that was crying for new stuff. It's a poor man's Cowboy Bebop with cool SFX, the same niche that made Firefly so popular, but with a serialized thriller plotline and big space battles to keep people hooked. The string is running out though. The new family drama plot line and the one guy getting fired for sex pest accusations have delivered a one-two punch on the show's momentum.
Oh yeah and they did a backstory episode on the coolest manly character on the show, and turns out he was a child gigolo. Exactly what fans wanted to hear.
That Amos backstory was incredibly bad.
The Expanse universe is mostly cribbed from Larry Niven's Sol System from his Known Space universe.
The politics of the Belt vs "flatlanders", the issues of water, radiation and gravity to conceive and birth children. Niven even wrote about the conflicts arising between an established terrestrial economy and a developing belt economy. He put a lot of thought and writing about the asymmetrical conflict between belters in small ships (with a lot of skill) vs bigger ships with specialized weapon systems.
Niven went into rapid decline after he discovered swinging. At least his career wasn't long enough for him to get woke?
I read the ice and fire books but wish I hadn’t considering we will most longer get an ending. I know he wanted to subvert Tolkien’s tropes
It's more like firefly in space
I thought it was pretty cool on TV. OP is complaining about diversity which is true.
I love the ship designs, as they are the first harder sci fi ships to really hit the mainstream. The diversity got on me eventually and I dropped off. Another problem is that the further the books got from the starting point, the less interested I became in them. It's hard for me to care about former Martians using alien shipyards to build a massive empire (and I think conquer Earth?) when I came into the series wanting to see the UN grapple with a Mars that could finally rival it on a small, interplanetary scale.
I see a lot of people praising the ship designs, but I can't ever make out what I'm looking at when it comes to the ship designs.
It feels like I'm missing something.
Then again, I've always had a preference for the A-Wings, the Viper from the original 1970s Battlestar Galactica (couldn't stand the remake), and Sybil Danning's ship from Battle Beyond the Stars.
Yes, but they tend to have nice shapes spouting from the ship and looks good to me. Though I am a huge fan of the flying gun spaceship design (cough Halo cough) so it's quite nice to see some slight variations on the design.
That's not totally true. They're shapely boxes in space.
I know I'm biased as fuck about this but anything normies rave about these days I'm instantly suspicious of. They usually only like stuff that's good by accident and are the exact sort of people who go along with fads even if it's totally astroturfed thanks to mass media.
Is this the one with a fat black woman as president of earth?? Couldve swore it was stacey m1a1 abrahams.
That's star trek
ah.. hard to keep track.
You are right about the book, and if you think the book's are cringe, you shouldn't check out the tv series. Then there's the drama of the actual actors. I think there was a metoo related event, but most of it is leaving my memory, thankfully.
I read the whole series once. I generally quite enjoyed it, though it got worse the longer it went on. The book you're on was about the weakest, IIRC. I would wholeheartedly recommend anyone read at least Book 1.
There's a non-binary space captain later.
I thought the diversity stuff was handled pretty decently as it just was there. Nothing was lingered on. Besides, given today's demographics, you can guess what the future of humanity is going to look like in 200-300 years.
The author, "James S.A. Corey" is actually two people. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Ty was George RR Martin's assistant. Just as GRRM, whose writing I very much enjoy, is an activist SJW leftist, so Ty and Daniel.
(Did anyone else remember that in Ender's Game, the famous general, Mazer Rackham, was a Maori from New Zealand?)
There's an old and persistent strand of science fiction writing that is obsessed with religion. I see these books as just more of that.
I’m just pissed the immortal space Caesar was made into an evil villain at the end
I only watched two episodes and "noped" out. Only reason I gave it a shot was because of Thomas Jane, but it had all the variable warning signs of media I abhor.
I only watch the fight scenes. Heard show went to shit on the half time. Atleast the ship battles didn't suffer too much
Is this the book that the Amazon series was based on? I remember it mentioned somewhere that it was Bezos favourite show