Hi guys,

Has anyone here read The Expanse series of books by James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, etc) ?

These were the books that, due to some striking similarities, made me want to play EoC again. The first battle scene in Leviathan got me up and searching for the game DVDs.

So I was reading the books and playing the game in parallel and right until the end of EoC and the second book I was time after time surprised by more and more details and coincidences

Of course they both have the same theme and some similarities are inevitable, and there is nothing that could really be taken as a direct copy but, even so, the amount of small connections is amazing.

Some of them:

[WARING: HUGE SPOILERS ON BOTH THE GAME AND THE BOOKS]
[REALLY]

Both of them take place in the fringes of space, where people struggle to make a living on asteroids belts and stations (The Badlands / the asteroid belt). That by itself lead to some more likeness.
Piracy and mining is a thing in both of them. Both has their oppressed community struggling for independence.
Both has some local factions uniting for their cause under a single banner (The League / OPA). Both factions have an strategist/politician leader with a past (Frankie Hoffer / Fred Johnson).
On both, the player has an special ship (command section / Rocinante). Rocinante (Don Quixote's horse) is the ship in The Expanse, one of the names you can give to your ship in EoC is Crazy Horse, got it, got it?
Both of them have a rich girl character that left her family to live with the renegades (Lori Trieste / Julie Mao).
Both have corporations as their primary antagonist and in both the army plays a role with them in the end (Maas / Protogen).
Both develop a subplot (that turn into a plot) with an weird alien thing with the potential to spread and end the human race.
Both deal a lot with the physics of space combat and travel.
And so on and on.......

[END OF SPOILERS]

Am I crazy?
I know o LOT of this is incidental and are an obvious consequence of the theme but, anyway, I kept having one little surprise after another.

So, if you want to read something with an EoC soul I guess I can recommend The Expanse.

Cheers.

Thanks, I'll have a look into Leviathan Wakes. I'll get back to you to tell how I likes it.

Thank you for recommending this read. I finished Leviathan Wakes yesterday, and I must say that I'm impressed. While it is essentially a mix of Independence War, System Shock (2) and Dead Space with quite a bit of a noir element, it still feels original, fresh and entertaining. I can definitely recommend the first book to any I-War lover.

I'll order Caliban's War and Abbadon's Gate now and hope that Cibola Burn will be released as paperback soon.

I'm in the middle of reading Caliban's War, the second book in the Expanse universe. You can add a healthy dose of the TV show Firefly to the mix I described above.

Hahahahaha

So true!

Love the references. Keep them comming ;)

Okay, here it comes: In the second book, Bobbie Draper's powered combat suit reminded me of the Clan Elementals in BattleTech. The suit may be described differently, but the basic functions - machine gun under the arm, HarJel to soften the impact and seal breached, emergency opening of the suite etc. - seem to be the same.

Nice!

I had pictured the suit as some kind of Halo Master Chief but the similarities with the Elemental are very telling.

I really would like to know if they got the inspiration from some game or games.

In a interview, they said most of the background already existed due to a game that one of them played. But I think it was some kind of RPG.

Maybe they are referring to Blue Planet, which is supposed to be an RPG that is set in the distant future, but with real-life physics and constraints: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Planet_(role-playing_game)

Yeah, that raised a flag or two!

By the way, have you seen SyFy is commissioning a 10 episode The Expanse series for 2015?

I read that in the Wiki article, but I won't get my hopes up until I see the pilot aired. Too many shows and movies were anounced and were never heard of again. The Babylon 5 movie and Neuromancer come to my mind immediately, and I think I could name a few others if given a little more time.

Still, this is good news, and I just hope they'll make it at least a decent one.

My greatest worry is not even if they do it or not.
I'm worried they make it and it is a crappy show, like Defiance or Falling Skies.

Well, I'm with you on Falling Skies (which seems to be made for Tea Party fans), but Defiance? I rather like that show and will buy me the season 1 blu-ray for Christmas. What is your main beef with that show?

I don't really know, but I think it's the overall quality.
It gives me an impression of a cheap MMORPG, badly put together.
I really wanted to like it (i just gave it up this week) but I came to hate the actors, the characters, the plot the effects... well maybe I know.

Bump for an old thread!

I actually had a hankering to play this game BECAUSE I loved watching the Newtonian dance of ships in this series on TV. It's what pushed me over my fear of the game difficulty and long mission lead in ;)

Have to admit that I really enjoyed the TV series, despite never having heard of the books. And I have to admit that while cheesy, I DID in fact enjoy Falling Skies (Defiance sort of sucked despite my sincere desire to want to like it).

But anyway - LOVED the SciFi Expanse (one of the better shows I've seen in a while) and glad it drew me to this series. Just started tonight and hoping it "clicks" for me as a pseudo-fix for my Privateer days and desire to command a large cap ship, in a physics bases flight system. Based on my short time so far, the megacorp privatized fringe, combined with effortless flicking of the flightstick hat switch and pirate leanings give me high hopes for a fun ride.

I haven't watched Falling Skies (and don't plan to, reading the reviews left a strong desire to avoid the show entirely), and Defiance's last season sucked (they killed off half of the beloved recurring roles in the first one-two episodes), but The Expanse (I have read only the first three novels, will buy the other ones once the latest book is available as paperback) is a real treat both in book form and as a TV series. Granted, some of the characters I pictured differently (Amos, for example, looks a bit like a big Baby), but both authors were deeply involved in the production, so I guess the actors have all been cast to character.