Chocolate & Peanut Butter: The Immersive Joy of Experiencing the Same Story Two Different Ways
My wife and I are rewatching The Expanse right now in anticipation of Amazon’s upcoming fourth season of the former SyFy show (as I write we are just about through season three). There are many things I love about the show, but in particular, there are ways in which the show takes the material from the books and expands on it (see what I did there?) in ways that both counterpoint the books and deepen them through character beats, world-building, and by taking advantage of all the myriad other small ways in which a live-action filmed experience can flesh out a written story. I can’t think of another genre show (or film or series of films) that works to compliment the source material so perfectly.
Certainly there are books and corresponding shows and films that are both fan favorites — like Game of Thrones or The Shining — but the filmed versions of these books take big liberties with the source material and stray from the books significantly, often to the chagrin of the die hard book lovers. Other filmed versions of printed stories attempt to adhere closely to the source material and in so doing, anger fans for either being a pale pantomime of the original (Watchmen) or for leaving out fan-favorite subplots and characters in the interest of run-time (Lord of the Rings).
It’s also fun to hate on filmed versions of beloved books that are universally panned as miserable failures (sorry, David Lynch’s Dune*) and one might be inclined to give up and just assume that novels and narrative film/TV are simply too distinct to ever truly compliment each other—that the square peg of a novel just won’t fit the round hole of a film or TV series.
Then there is The Expanse. I started reading book one of the series, Leviathan Wakes, just as the first season of the show was airing on SyFy, and I think it was the perfect way to experience both.
Leviathan Wakes is arguably the weakest of the novels so far, mostly (I think) because the characters and world were still so new to readers (and were to the writers as well) and their voices weren’t yet fully realized. Also, some the best (and most distinct, in terms of voice) characters in the series (Chrisjen Avasarala and Bobbie Draper, in particular) aren’t introduced until later books. One of the complaints I had with LW was that many of the characters sounded the same to me in my head as I read, as if they didn’t have fully realized and distinct personalities yet.
Similarly, I have heard many people who have not read the books say they started to watch The Expanse on SyFy (or Prime) and had a hard time getting into it at first, and indeed, I can understand why. In the first several episodes of the series, we are introduced to a very large number of characters, a political structure and social caste system, and some (very realistic) important space-physics concepts, and the filmic exposition of these characters and concepts is quick and fairly unforgiving. For example, the (important to understand) reason that people who live on the asteroid, Ceres, have enough gravity to walk around (despite Ceres having a natural mass-derived gravity of only 0.029% of Earth’s gravity), is because the asteroid has been artificially “spun up,” creating a centrifugal force effect that pushes outwards from the center of the asteroid. So to Belters living inside Ceres, “down” is the direction of the outer surface of the asteroid and “up” is the direction of the core, or the center of spin. This basic way that world works comes up again and again and is central to several important story points, but the way the show informs viewers of all this is in a single sweeping long-take shot in the opening moments of the first episode. You could be forgiven for not fully grasping this critical sci-fi element if you didn’t watch the shot several times in a row (like I did—it’s awesome).
This is one way in which reading the books improves on the experience of watching the show: the books take the time to explain these concepts clearly. This difference will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched a film based on a book, but critically, the reverse is just as true with The Expanse.
The world in which The Expanse is set is a complicated melange of future human cultures spread out amongst the various habitable parts of the solar system. The chief political factions include Earth (the United Nations), Mars (the Martian Congressional Republic), and the “Belt,” which consists of people who live in and mine the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, as well as some of the moons around both Jupiter and Saturn. “Belters” are (on paper, at least) citizens of the UN or the MCR, depending on which planet controls that particular part of the Belt, but, as our story begins, there is also a growing movement for independence among the Belters, represented by the collective idea of the Outer Planets Alliance (the OPA)—a sometimes radical faction of Belters (itself made up of rival factions) who are willing to fight and die for Belter independence.
But the world of The Expanse is so much more complicated than the above description suggests, and the show is able to add nuance that you don’t really get from reading the books. Take, for example, the culture of the Belters. In the books, author James S. A. Corey (a pen name for writing partners Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) has crafted a clever colloquial way of communicating amongst the Belters—a combination of a creole-like patois that draws from English, various romance languages, Chinese and many other sources, and a set of hand signals and gestures that derive from spending so much time in the vacuum of space where sound doesn’t travel. The show uses these same elements (I highly recommend a second watch of the show with subtitles turned on so you can pick up just how much “lang-Belta” is used throughout), but not evenly among Belters. Some Belters speak in a way that is almost impossible to understand, so thick is their accent and reliance on the creole. Others, like Detective Miller, can speak and understand the language, but generally don’t use it in common practice. There are also characters, like OPA leader Anderson Dawes, who hover between these extremes. It’s a lot like traveling around Louisiana and encountering a rich mix of cultural backgrounds, accents, and local pride. Our ears pick these differences up at once, without any need for formal exposition. In the books, all Belters seem to slide into and out of lang-Belta with the same ease, which has the effect of homogenizing the culture. The show has done an excellent job of consistently showing us the rich diversity of the Belt.
The result is that watching the show and reading the books actually improves the experience of both—each is made richer by experiencing the other. I cannot think of another example like it, at least not in genre fiction. Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Francis Ford Coppola’s filmed adaptation perhaps comes closest to this sort of symbiotic relationship between media, but serial TV is so much better suited to adapting a novel, just in terms of length. A two-hour movie is much more analogous to a short story or novella with respect to how much narrative can be conveyed in each.
If you’re someone who has tried to watch The Expanse and had trouble getting hooked, or has attempted to read Leviathan Wakes only to stop part of the way in, I strongly recommend doing both simultaneously. They support each other in striking ways and your experience will be richer for for the combination.
(* Yes, Dune has a cult following of fans, but even Lynch himself has had his name removed from various cuts of the film, and its critical reception was chilly to say the least. Roger Ebert wrote: “This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.”)
