The Expanse (SyFy)

Holy shit, that was amazing. I actually love the Thomas Jane Punisher film, so that was a real treat. Thank you!

Season 2 of The Expanse will air in February and Syfy has done a 20 minute documentary hosted by Adam Savage that goes behind the scenes and recaps the first season. Its a nice way to refresh the character in your mind and its pretty interesting as well.

Finished up season 1 , so good!

I really like the series so far but they need to tone down the comparisons to Game of Thrones in that promo.

Finished the first season over the weekend and really enjoyed it. Enough to resume reading the books. I remember feeling that #1 crawled a bit but it’s been a couple of years; is #2 the same in that way? Not that I care, probably going to start it regardless.

I personally thought that the second book was pretty good. Not as good as the first, but still enjoyable. I thought the third book was merely decent and thought that the fourth was actually pretty bad. However, the fifth and sixth books have both been excellent.

All of Abraham’s (Daniel Abraham is half of James S. A. Corey) books tend to drag a bit in the second act.

I absolutely loved this show and haven’t read the books, and jeez. You guys sure are free with the spoilers up in here.

I would agree on your assessment of the first three books. I have the fourth one but haven’t read it yet, but seeing how you liked the fifth and sixth books I will go into the fourth with an open mind.

If the 4th one is the one that pretty much takes place mostly on one planet, then I wouldnt call it bad so much as I would call it out of sync. I liked the book for what it was but it seemed to be kind of out of place in the series. The series does get back to what made it good after that book.

It is, and I agree with this. It’s pretty clearly the worst of the six, but it’s not terrible - it just doesn’t make a lot of sense within what we know of the series, even two books later. I’m sure, or I hope anyways, that it will be more clear why what happened mattered by the time we get to the end. But as is, the whole book feels out of place.

“Out of sync” is a good way to put it. Much of the series’ plots orbit around the economic and political whirlwind that was engendered when… ah, I’ll go ahead and put it into spoilers since this is the TV thread.

[spoiler]The massive gold rush started to grab up the newly revealed planets drives the motivations for most of the actors in books five and six. While the authors seem (for now) to be more interested in that fallout and Sol-system events than they are in the “New Worlds”, I reckon they knew that they had to at least show SOMETHING of what was happening in all those alluded-to new colonies.

Thus Book 4 is kind of an interlude where they get to tell a Space-Western story that sets up some of the back-story for the next two or three books. It’s just that a little Space-Western about a little mining outpost was “out of sync” with this solar-political story that the rest of the series was telling.[/spoiler]

So knowing that could I safely skip Book 4 and just look up a plot summary online? These are the types of books I usually listen to instead of read but apparently Book 4’s audible presentation is quite bad so I’m wondering if I should just skip it and move on to Book 5.

Yeah, for whatever reason, Jefferson Mays wasn’t available for Book 4, so they had Erik Davies do it instead. It’s not like Davies isn’t a fine narrator, but you get used to the voices, you know?

I think you’d do fine looking up the plot on-line somewhere. As far as I can tell Book 4’s events don’t really act as an anchor for any of the other books.

That said, it’s not a TERRIBLE book. The writing is fine, the plot chugs along fine. It’s just a bad book when compared to the others in the series, but there’s no reason you couldn’t go back and read it later.

I actually was reading the series up to book 3’s release, and got sidetracked since then. I’ll still pop book 4 into my queue, but now with managed expectations.

I’m enjoying book 4 so far. shrug

Yeah, the worst Daniel Abraham book is still better than most of anything else.

Season 2 is live! Two episodes released.

Mars is in the house!

They are really good, maybe better then anything in the first season.

This kinda snuck up on me. I just noticed the new episodes on my DVR; time to grab a beer and start watching some low-tech sci-fi goodness!

Well, if the first two episodes are any indication, then this show is not going through a sophomore slump. Though I will say that there are several place where they really need to close caption belter patois.