Caliban's War

James S. A. Corey is the pen name for the author duo of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. The world of The Expanse began as a role-playing game that Franck developed, set in a futuristic world where humans have colonized a large part of the solar system thanks to a fusion-based engine called the Epstein drive. Abraham is the author of the fantasy series The Black Sun’s Daughters, written under the pen name M.L.N. Hanover; he also collaborated on the 2007 novel Hunter’s Run with George R. R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones.

After participating in the role-playing game, Abraham proposed writing a novel based on Franck’s world and characters, and the project grew into an active collaboration. At this time of writing, The Expanse includes nine novels and nine novellas or short stories that take place during or around the events of the books. The Syfy channel adapted several early novels into three seasons of a television series, which Amazon acquired and continued for another three seasons (2015-2022). Leviathan Wakes (2011) was nominated for a Hugo Award, a prestigious honor for science fiction novels, and The Expanse later won a Hugo Award as a series.

The nine novels cover four decades and eventually move beyond the solar system to other realms that are accessed through a structure called the Ring. In early books, the known world includes several planets and their outposts, all peopled by humans. Earth, which is severely polluted and overpopulated, has established outposts on Luna (the moon) and the moons of some other planets. Mars has its own civilization, the Martian Congressional Republic, which, when the series begins, has achieved an uneasy truce with Earth. Then there are those who have grown up in the outer stations located in the Kuiper Belt of asteroids; people who live there are known as Belters, experience a variety of physical alterations as a result of lower gravity, and are considered by Earthers to be an inferior laboring class. The Outer Planet Alliance (OPA), a militaristic third entity that seeks to unite the Belters and become a rival power to Earth and Mars, is led by an ex-Navy officer and acquaintance of Holden’s, Fred Johnson.

Leviathan Wakes introduces the crew of the spaceship Rocinante, who continue to be core characters throughout the series. (Rocinante is the name of the horse ridden by the titular knight in Miguel de Cevantes’s Don Quixote, a 17th-century novel that satirizes the notion of the heroic quest.) Captaining the ship is James Holden, an ex-Navy Earther with a streak of heroism mixed with self-destruction. The ship’s XO is Naomi Nagata, a Belter and an extremely capable engineer who develops a romantic relationship with Holden. Their colleagues include Amos Burton, a criminal on Earth and a mechanic on the Rocinante, and Alex Kamal, their good-natured Martian pilot. Key characters introduced in Caliban’s War return in later books, including Bobbie, Avasarala, and Prax.

In Leviathan Wakes, the crew of the Rocinante are thrown together when their previous ship is blown up. Eventually, Holden is drawn into the investigation of his friend, Detective Joe Miller, who is tracking the disappearance of Julie Mao, a researcher last seen on Eros. Julie is the daughter of tech titan Jules-Pierre Mao, whose corporation holds vast interests throughout the system. Miller learns that Julie and more than a million other people on Eros Station have been infected by what he and Holden start calling the protomolecule: a compound deposited on Phoebe, a moon of Saturn, by an alien civilization that intended to intervene in the evolution of Earth billions of years ago. Mao’s corporation, Protogen, recovered the protomolecule and began experiments on humans. Miller discovers that the protomolecule is a virulent virus that hideously transforms, then kills its human host. Hoping to stop it, Holden plans to steer Eros into the sun to annihilate it. Instead, Eros Station plunges into Venus, with Miller aboard. Holden delivers the last remaining sample of the protomolecule to Fred Johnson and the Rocinante joins the OPA force.

In Caliban’s War, the protomolecule continues to evolve. While human agents struggle to control and exploit it, something nonhuman evolves on Venus that eventually launches into space at the end of the second novel. This development continues the threat to humanity that comprises the key conflict of the books, but it also stretches the sci-fi setting into new dimensions. The name Caliban alludes to the character in William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, where Caliban is a monstrous inhabitant of a distant island that has been enslaved by a magician, Prospero, whom he wishes to defeat so he might have his island back.

In Abaddon’s Gate (2013), the third novel in the series, it emerges that the entity from Venus has formed a mysterious structure known as the Ring, which lies beyond the orbit of Uranus and becomes the focus of contention between all three of the solar system’s forces, who learn that the Ring is a set of wormholes leading to other solar systems where they can expand their colonization. While Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), and Babylon’s Ashes (2016) follow conflicts between the three forces attempting to rule the Sol system, the last three books—Persepolis Rising (2017), Tiamat’s Wrath (2019), and Leviathan Falls (2021)—deal with conflicts emerging from a different solar system, Laconia.

Thematically, the books explore the consequences of human striving and exploration, the impacts of conquest and colonization, and the costs of human ingenuity and human greed set against a vast canvas that brings in other worlds for contrast. Yet at their heart, the novels are tales of humanity succeeding: forming bonds of affection despite adverse conditions, fighting to protect one another and the vulnerable, and working to create a world that has the resources to sustain all its inhabitants.

Corey’s next endeavor is The Captive’s War series, which begins with The Mercy of Gods (2024), in which a clash of alien and human worlds sets a quest for freedom and survival against an apocalyptic background.