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Comment by Hendrikto | Hacker News Reader

Have you watched it? It’s not bad... but not really good either. Much better shows were cancelled in the past.

I watched the first season a few years ago. It is good, solid, hard sci-fi. But like said below, it didn't 'wow' me. Considering the current lack of good sci-fi series, I really appreciated the show.

Yes - personally I like it.

But I'm trying to be objective and note the lack of correlation between a shows percevied quality and how that does/not translate into ratings.

I was missing the "wow, awesome!" effect. Only watched S1 so far and it was.. nice. solid. interesting. But it didn't spark joy or made me a fan. (Killjoys did, for example.)

S2 has more "wow, awesome" than S1, and then the few S3 episodes that aired so far beat the crap out of S2. VFX work got better and better as the show progressed.

Everyone is different but S1 of The Expanse gave me more joy than any other show I've watched in a long time.

While S1 did have its fair share of space battles, it was so nice watching something that wasn't all guns and fist fights and did so without having to resort to hours of dull pseudo-emotional monologues and barely relevant flashbacks.

Usually that kind of highbrow writing is reserved for "who done it" style crime dramas. It was refreshing to watch that same formula applied to the sci-fi genre given how cheesy or needlessly "emo" the genre has been of late.

Like?

I really like the show. It is quite dense.

Yeah, I stopped watching once the paranormal stuff started. Why can’t we have just realistic SciFi?

What paranormal stuff? Are you calling aliens paranormal?

I was referring to the protomolcule stuff, clearly to explainable by our current understanding of science

Citing Wikipedia: Paranormal events are phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described to lie beyond normal experience or scientific explanation.

In that case 99% of sci-fi would be classed as "paranormal". Be it warp drives, replicators, holodecks, teleporters, deep space communication platforms, shapeshifting lifeforms / changelings (DS9), ascended lifeforms (SG1) / the Q (TNG), aliens that drink lifeforce (Atlantis), artificial lifeforms, cold fusion bombs / red matter (or pretty much anything from those shitty Star Trek reboots). And lets not forget time travel.

I think it's also worth remembering that the "fi" part of "sci-fi" actually stands for "fiction" and not "factual information" :P

True :-) I just liked that about the expanse that everything else was really realistic. Achievable by humans within the next couple of hundred years

The protomolecule is magic not paranormal.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke -"

As someone who has read the first 5 books in the series, there is not a single paranormal thing in the Expanse.

SPOILERS

I’ve only read the first 3 but thats definitely not true. FTL communication, physics-defying space maneuvering, the giant space ring thing controlling the speed of the surrounding armadas...

Even if there are attempts to create some explanation for it, in a hard sci-if story, it’s basically paranormal in all but name.

In this story there is nothing supernatural about any of these things. They may be things that are as of yet unexplained, but just because we don't understand them yet doesn't make them paranormal. Just like there was nothing supernatural about flying before we understood how it works. It's just physics we haven't figured out yet.

Paranormal are things that are by definition outside the explainable universe. It's not that we don't have an explanation, it's that they are by their very nature unexplainable.

POSSIBLE SPOILER

The proto-molecule isn't paranormal, except for one aspect - the FTL communication. It's basically just a species-generic virus with an embedded AI.

Dammit, please start your post with "SPOILER ALERT "!

Well I'll add it, but it's not a spoiler, it's just my idea.

Well, it has some other means of abusing spacetime beyond FTL communications, but your description is mostly accurate. It's a sophisticated piece of nanotech built by someone with much better grasp of (in-universe) physics than humans have.

Thanks. The spoiler part (for me) was the FTL communication.

I think there were hints of that already in S2, but I don't recall it was mentioned explicitly so far. You could piece that out from the show if you knew what to look for. The books have been more explicit about it earlier in the storyline.

Thanks. A little off-topic, but for someone in my situation whose already watched seasons 1 and 2, would you recommend still reading the books?

Definitely. I started reading only after watching entire S1. The books are better than the show.

(BTW. I found myself to prefer reading source books after watching a movie/series. In this order, my imagination is already primed by the show, so I don't experience the clash between how I imagined the characters vs. how the producers imagined them.)

I started reading (well, listening to the audiobooks) after watching S2. Highly recommended.

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