Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Creators of The Expanse

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

Season 4 of The Expanse is about to begin on Amazon Prime. Host Mat Kaplan visits with the authors of the eight novels (so far) that are the basis of this outstanding hard science fiction series that begins with humankind having become a spacefaring species that spans the solar system. We’ve also got space headlines from The Downlink. Bruce Betts celebrates more recognition for the Planetary Society’s LightSail project in this week’s What’s Up. https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/1211-2019-the-expanse-authors.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Inside the Universe of the Expanse, with its authors, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Forgive this fanboy's excitement. fanboys' excitement. As this episode of our show is published, we're just two days away from the season four premiere of a wonderful show that was almost lost forever. And we're also not far from release of the last book in the series of novels that the TV drama is based on. The Expanse is one of the best hard science fiction sagas I've ever enjoyed. Its authors and producers will join me in minutes. We'll start with a few real-world developments brought to us by Planetary Society Editorial Director Jason Davis. These and other stories are in his weekly digest we call The

Downlink. The European Space Agency's KEOPS spacecraft may be in space by the time you hear this. Of course it's an acronym. The Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite will study nearby stars to determine the density of planets that are already known to be circling them, another step toward discovering if there are exoplanets that are suited for life. Speaking of exoplanets, it's possible that the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to tell us if some rocky worlds have atmospheres. A team of scientists has proposed a new and much faster technique for detecting atmospheres. Now we just have to get

JWST up there and working. That's expected in 2021. Both a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship and a Russian Progress have docked with the International Space Station. Together, they have delivered about five metric tons of cargo, including experiments like the Barley Germination Project we talked about a couple of episodes ago. And Japan's Hayabusa 2 has turned its ion engines back on. They will speed those precious samples of asteroid Ryugu back to Earth in about a year. There's more waiting for you at planetary.org slash downlink. Jason publishes a new edition every Friday. Many of you will remember my visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico to attend last spring's Interplanetary Festival. I've saved a highlight of that visit till now, as the expanse is about

to return to our TV screens. The story starts in our own solar system. Humankind has spread beyond Uranus and is divided into three major factions. Plots generally revolve around the crew of the Rocinante, a fighting ship that has been, shall we say, liberated from the powerful military forces based on Mars. Rocinante was Don Quixote's horse. It's a great name for a spaceship that is captained by the decidedly quixotic James Holden. All of the characters are terrific. The action is jaw-dropping. The planetary politics have much to say about our own times.

And thankfully, the science is realistic and impressive, even when it eventually moves out across the Milky Way. For these elements and more, we can thank Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank. They write the series novels and short stories under the pen name James S.A. Corey. And they are also producers of the TV show, which after being canceled by SyFy, has moved to Amazon Prime. Daniel and Ty and a bunch of their enthusiastic fans joined me last June under an Interplanetary Festival tent. From Santa Fe, New Mexico at the Interplanetary Festival, this is Matt Kaplan for Planetary Radio with the authors, the creators of The Expanse, Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham. You guys have a lot of fans here today. And I'm one of them.

It is an absolute honor to have you here. I told you just before we got started that it was listeners who, I think you already had about four books out, first said to me, what, you were not reading The Expanse? You have got to get started with this. And I was only a few pages in to Leviathan Wakes when I was completely hooked. So thank you. Thank you. I'm glad it's working for you.

Yeah, it sure is. I read that the two of you met not too far from here in Albuquerque. That is true. For those of you who are not present and would just like to know who's talking, I'm Daniel, so when you hear this voice, that's me. I was born in Albuquerque. I've been in Albuquerque pretty much my whole life. So it wasn't a big commute for me.

Ty moved to Albuquerque, and we had some friends in common, and Ty wound up in the same writing group that I was in, the critique group that I was going to every month. We wound up being kind of the two people who lived close enough to each other and he introduced me to console gaming and was trying to bring me over and get me to play Left 4 Dead and generally reduce my productivity. It didn't work out so well. So then after that, it was just blood everywhere. I mean, it was... Obviously inspiration for some of the scenes in the series.

It's really easy to hide bodies in the West Mesa. Yeah. Ty, you had started to create the Expanse universe with something else in mind. You weren't originally thinking of a series of best-selling science fiction novels. No, there's been a lot of versions of the Expanse. I mean, initially it was a video game pitch a long time ago. And then a tabletop game and then eventually the books. So it's been through a lot of iterations and now a TV show.

I'm waiting for the stage musical. I think it's ripe for conversion to a musical, absolutely. Daniel, what I heard was that after the two of you got together, and it was, what's the name of that con? Bubonic Con. Is it after Bubonic Play? Yes, absolutely. Because New Mexico is one of the few places where you can still get that.

Perry Rodent is their mascot. We're just kind of leaning into the strengths we have here in New Mexico. I mean, they could have gone Haunticon. They started a long time ago. Hot Fires wasn't a thing yet. For the gritty reboot, it'll be... You guys just keep doing patter. I think that's great. I love that.

How did you find out about The Expanse? Was it you who thought, hey, this would make a good book? Yes, it was me who thought this would make a good book and I'm smug about that. What happened was Ty was running this tabletop role-playing game with a bunch of our mutual friends.

He was up in Santa Fe. I couldn't go because I had a kid. My kid was like newborn. Driving up to Santa Fe for a role-playing game session just wasn't practical. So I whined about it enough that he started running an instance down in Albuquerque with just me and him and our wives. And we did that probably only three or four times before it became clear to me he'd already done all the hard part. He had huge binders with all of the information about it. Anytime I asked him a question about the world, he knew the answers

and could just tell me. I said, we should write this up, make it into a book, sell it for pizza money, it'll be fun. And the reason I'm smug is the folks up in Santa Fe included Melinda Snodgrass, Ian Tregellis, George R.R. Martin, Walter John Williams. None of them thought that. That was me. They all had the first shot. They all missed it. I'll bring up now that you have a long history with that guy that a lot of our audience must have heard of, George R.R. Martin, right?

Game of Thrones, Ring Any Bells. You've been a longtime collaborator, right? I've worked with George on, I adapted a lot of his work as comic book scripts. I did a lot of the scripting work for that. And we wrote a novel with Gardner Dozois called Hunter's Run. And more since then? Well, some wild card stuff. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of.

Wild card universe. Wild card universe is certainly a massive project that's been going on. It's such a huge project, and I'm such a small part of it. I always feel a little weird taking credit for it. I made a couple characters and told a few stories in this massive project that he has overseen. Yeah. Ty, had you written a book before? No.

So you took to it like a fish into water. Because, I mean, don't you guys, I don't know if you actually alternate chapters, but don't you sort of specialize in, since the story is frequently told from the viewpoint, chapter by chapter of different characters, you hand it off, don't you? We started out that way, but that eventually sort of went away. When we first started, we picked which viewpoint character we would write, but I think by about book five

we weren't doing that anymore. Yeah, it got to the point where we kind of knew each other's voices. After long enough, you wind up kind of losing the confusion. You've done it long enough, you've practiced it, so I could imitate Ty's voice, Ty could imitate mine, and we're both editing each other's work the whole way through anyway, so

there's always that error correction phase. We divide it up more now by content, so if the chapter is about somebody being sad, Daniel writes that. Yeah, pretty much. If the chapter has a lot of explosions in it, I write that. Yeah. It's pretty much kind of a violence and romantic failure division of labor. That's how we do that. Seems to work. So far. I mean, we have one more book in the project, so we'll see whether we stick with landing.

I'll come back to that. Since I guess our heroes still have to deal with the biggest challenge to their universe. Although I'm so afraid of saying too much. We have a lot of Expanse fans here, so we can say anything in front of them. But there's so much more going on in this series. Before we get even close to any of that, once you finished the first book, Leviathan Wakes, did you have any idea it would take off the way it did?

No. I mean, when we sent it to the publisher, we sent a completed first book, but then we also sent sort of a one paragraph outline of the next two books. The idea being that they might not just want to buy a standalone, they might want to buy

something with the idea of a series. And we would sell it to them either way. So we just sort of said, in book two this happens, in book three this happens. And literally that was the amount of thought that went into it at the time. We wanted to have a series title. So we made up a series title by going, well, what's a synonym for big? going, well, what's a synonym for big? And it was really us marketing the book to publishers that was the thing that turned it from a standalone novel into a series.

But it has become, I think it is right up there with any of the great science fiction sagas throughout history. Foundation Trilogy, you name it. Well, I think we should check in on that in about 50 years. Oh, okay. I'll give you that, but I bet you're going to do okay. Listen, I was on the freeway like a week ago, and I do a double take because the car in front of me, I see,

has an MCRN, Mars Congressional Republic Navy sticker on it. I have the original member of the MCRN here on my time. So it's Marvin the Martian. Obviously, it is, maybe it won't be in a half a century, but it is a cultural phenomenon right now. Well, we're hoping so. It's doing okay. It has certainly been a weird ride for us.

We were aiming for something that was fun to do and would make pizza money. And so this has overshot that. We're doing something else now. I could rave for hours about the entire series and what you create and how you open up the galaxy to humanity. But it's really, for our purposes on Planetary Radio, it's the early books that probably are more relevant and will give less away, although we may still have a few spoilers, warnings to anybody who has not been through the books already. It is this future of our solar neighborhood that you drop us into. At the very beginning of Leviathan Wakes, it's already all in place

that I think is really going to be relevant for our Planetary Radio audience. I wonder how much of that system-wide civilization and economy that you've designed, a lot of it is made a lot easier because of one technological development. You know the one I'm thinking of, right? The Epstein Drive. Or is it Epstein? I don't know. He's dead. We don't get to ask that. That allows everybody to get places a lot faster than they would

with propulsion technology we know about now. Do you think that that kind of universe, excuse me, that kind of solar system that you created, would it have been practical without this way? And we should say it's not like warp drive. It's just a really efficient way of creating a rocket to get people from here to there. Yeah, I mean, it's just a fusion reactor with a little afterburner on it. No, I mean, I think the reality is that while we will certainly send more stuff out into the solar system, and they're talking about a permanent base on the moon, which is great, talking about

manned exploration of Mars, which is really cool, the economic argument for massive expansion into the solar system is a difficult one to make right now, especially when you can use robots to do things. It feels unlikely for that reason, but as we've often said, we don't find robots interesting to write about, so we didn't do that version of the future. But I mean, if you're looking at where we are now and the likelihood of the future, that seems much more likely is that if we want to mine something off of an asteroid, we send robots out to do it. In your solar system, in your universe, there are three major factions.

You've got Earth, you've got Mars, and you have those fascinating folks, the Belters, who really occupy more than just the big asteroids in the belt, right? Yeah, anything beyond Mars, really. Yeah. The belters, I guess at least their ancestors, they went out there to get away from. Well, or they went out there to make money. I mean, I don't think it was that first wave of migration

was built on the idea of making an independent, autonomous space, so much as finding ways to get lots of money for getting platinum. So much of human migration is driven by those kind of immediate family-sized monetary and economic issues. That's how it's been through a lot of history, and that's how we imagined it going forward. So not so much pilgrims trying to avoid oppression and set up their own oppressive society, but the profit motive. Yeah. Almost everything that happens, happens because somebody thinks they can make money

off of it. And yet, these belters, they get a pretty raw deal overall. Well, many people are wrong. Well, I mean, it's a pretty clear line from them to our modern earth. You know, the people in the DRC who dig up coltan, which is an incredibly valuable mineral, they're not rich. The people who dig the coltan up don't ever get rich from that. So the idea that just because you're the person who does the manual labor that extracts the valuable resource, that's often not connected to who actually makes money on that resource. And so we were sort of riffing on that, that the people who went out and dug these things up in this incredibly dangerous environment in space, they're not the ones who get rich off of

it. Somebody back on Earth later in Mars. Has found a way to leverage that. Yeah, they're the ones who get rich off of it. And that just feels very real. They get their revenge, of course. Well, again, we read a lot of history. And one of the things you see a lot through history is this

cycle of oppression and kind of institutionalized cruelty then playing out over generations. It becomes a cultural fact. It becomes a thing that is passed down from generation to generation. And, yeah, it fuels future conflicts. And as long as you have those wounds that aren't healed,

they keep flaring back up. Yeah. The more I learned about the belters and their society the more i thought of the great marshall mcluhan quote first we shape our tools and then our tools shape us which i guess would apply to the worlds we live on or inside of as well are you ever sorry that on the TV series they can't physically represent belters the way you guys, they really have become almost, not a different species, but they're very different even physically from the way we are

here on Earth. Yeah, on the other hand we have a long history of finding other physical traits to be prejudiced about. It's nice that we have one, especially for the books, where we can talk about that kind of prejudice and racism without actually co-opting anybody's lived experience here. It would have been interesting if we could do that visually, but I feel like we did a pretty good job making it a separate culture. Yeah, but there's also an argument to be made that if the Belters were very visibly different from everybody else in the same way they are in the books,

that the average viewer who hasn't read the books just sees them as an alien race. Which sort of messes up the whole point of the thing. Yeah, yeah. Because the whole point, and somebody earlier was asking, you know, which faction do we side with? And, you know, sort of the thesis of the series is that factionalism is the problem, that picking sides is the problem, that tribalism is the problem. And so if you give a viewer a way to easily identify tribes, in some ways that sort of takes away from the message that you're trying to send.

There is one scene, at least only one that I know of in the TV series, where you do see a belter who looks the way you described. It's got to be CGI. It's a guy who's like in a dungeon. Hung on hooks. Yeah. We've had some tall belters. Yeah, there's a scene in a bar early on in the first season

where a very tall guy walks by. early on in the first season where a very tall guy walks by. And the one guy, the Zocalo who was giving stuff to Miller and Temetimba, he was amazing. Yeah, so we do try to find these very tall

thin people that we cast and the idea being that they're the extreme version of that. The ones who grew up in very low gravity environments with that sort of extreme physiology. Ignoring the physical changes that have taken place, I think the TV series does a pretty good job of capturing how culturally different belters have become, where they've developed basically their own language or patois or what, dialect. It's really, it's fascinating. And the way that they use their

hands to communicate because they're so used to being in pressure suits all of which you guys created well all of which we stole from other places i mean let's let's be let's be fair about that the the hand gestures are speculating up off of scuba diving now. You know, Ty was talking about the Belter Creole being our version of Greek fisherman's language, where you have people who are from a bunch of different countries with a bunch of different languages all working the same waters and doing the same job. Yeah, you find ways to communicate, and that becomes its own thing.

Yeah, you take the word from each language that best describes a thing, and that becomes a new language. It's just all the best words. Yeah. If you assume that every country on Earth sent people out into space, that's hundreds of languages. Those people all have to find a way

to talk to each other. And that, you wind up sort of a new thing. It's a great synthesis. I love reading when, just a few days ago, I had meant to read for ages the short story

The Butcher of Anderson Station. Finally read it a few days ago. It's wonderful. And there is a lot of Belter speech in there. And it's just great to read. Well, the version we have in the books is what you might call not

rigorous. It was built to have an effect and to create an experience for the reader. It wasn't built to accurately represent linguistic drift. For the show, it's much more rigorous and accurate. Was somebody brought in? Yeah, we hired a linguist. Wow, okay. To create a language.

We are not linguists. That is not something we do. But we should add, you guys are both producers on the show, right? Yes. We are, yes. We are more involved in the show than any other writer I know has been involved with anything they have had adapted from them. It's weird.

We are in a very strange space with that. I'm glad of it. I have to mention one other almost little throwaway short scene. It can't last more than three seconds. It is in the television series. I think it says something about the accuracy that all of you have gone for in the TV series. And it's where somebody is pouring a drink, and they're on one of the asteroids that the Belters live in. You can see, as the liquid is poured, it goes a little bit to the side. Coriolis effect. And I thought, damn, that's good! Now, it's very exaggerated.

So you can see it. So you can actually see it. Because in reality, it would be much less exaggerated than that. But that curve would be there. But we wanted to make sure it was visible to the viewer. We try to go for a universe in which, like, inertia works and gravity works. And it turns out that's enough to make people think you're hard science fiction as opposed to kind of squishy soft, a little kind of...

You get a lot of credit for that. But that's one of the great things about the books and the TV series, I think. Because I know that the two of you also collaborated on a Star Wars novel. We did. That was less rigorous. That was actually... Funny thing, the climax of that Star Wars novel had some things going on that were ridiculous. There was a point where we were getting ready to kind of choreograph the final battle, and Ty was going, but this is not possible. I said, it's Star Wars.

It's fine. Which is why I think of it as a fantasy series rather than a science fiction series. Which is perfectly legitimate. Nothing wrong with that. But The Expanse is science fiction. It's good science fiction. Good science, I think.

It's okay. Everybody here has a much higher opinion of your work, I think, don't you guys? I have an extremely high opinion of my own work. What I don't have a high opinion of is my grasp of rigorous science. I am not a scientist. A lot of the stuff that we brought, all the science that we brought to it, we brought to it because they were things that we already loved and we already knew and we had

already spent our time learning about out of love, you know, out of kind of an interest in the subject. We have done very little research specifically for the books or for the show. We've done a lot of research just because we liked being educated, and then we used that for the show. There's an old quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, never marry for money, go where the money is, then marry for love. We didn't study in order to do this. We made this out of the stuff that we had already studied. Maybe that's one of the reasons it's such a great series of books. More from Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank, creators of The Expanse, is just ahead. Hey, everybody, it's Matt with another opportunity to talk to you about The Great Courses Plus,

and in particular, one course that I'm going to get to in a moment. But as I have mentioned, they have thousands of lectures from dark matter to ancient Egypt to the art of negotiating to cooking. And of course, with The Great Courses Plus, you have access to all of these great streaming programs from terrific instructors, including Sabina Stanley, who is the professor who teaches A Field Guide to the Planets. This is outstanding. I wish I could play a sample of this course for you.

It is absolutely terrific. The graphics are great. It even gives honorable mention to LightSail. It is a terrific way to learn more about the basis of all the stuff that we talk about. We've got this fantastic offer for Planetary Radio listeners. A full free month of unlimited access. But you must sign up using my special URL. And that is thegreatcoursesplus.com slash planetary. That's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash planetary for access to all of the Great Courses Plus courses for one month, including a field guide to the planets.

I was going to leave the belt behind, and I was going to talk about characters later, but there's one character. Okay, go for it. My favorite belter, Joe Miller, who is just, I mean, straight out of some noir novel, except it's happening in space. So one of the things that's really interesting about science fiction generally is that there's not a basic science fiction story with almost every other genre when you pick it up you know what you're getting if you pick up a a romance novel either they're gonna hate each other and fall in love or love each other and die depending if it's pride and prejudice or romeo and juliet if you have a mystery novel there's going to be a crime and someone's going to solve it. If you have, you know, any of those have the story that they're working on, that they're riffing on, they're in conversation with.

Science fiction doesn't do that. Science fiction, you could be picking up an Ursula Le Guin thing that's this amazing sociological treatise with this very thoughtful plot wrapped around it. You could be picking up an action film in book form. You could be picking up whatever it was Philip K. Dick was doing, because that guy was a little weird by the end. And they all fall under science fiction. So one of the things we got to do with The Expanse was talk to different genres along the way.

Leviathan Wakes was definitely our science fiction noir, and Caliban's War was our science fiction political thriller, and Abaddon's Gate was our science fiction haunted house story, and Sibyl O'Byrne was our science fiction western. And there's room. There's room in science fiction to do that. You've got to, for the uninitiated, give the elevator speech bio of Joe

Miller. And don't forget the hat. Joe Miller is a detective for Star Helix Security doing police work, private police work on Sirius Station, one of the great port cities of the belt. He wears, in the books, a pork pie hat and is caught between being a belter, a man who's a native of his city, and the enforcement arm of a government that's very distant and fairly oppressive, and he's a little broken by it. The thing that always amazes me is, I mean, we did deliberately wrote Miller to be problematic and a little creepy. Yeah. He gets creepier. He goes through a lot of changes.

The number of people who just love him unabashedly always surprise me. I'm like, you know he's creepy, right? Yeah. I mean, he's deliberately creepy because we wanted that guy to have that particular story. But he's sort of accidentally heroic rather than, like, deliberately heroic. So it always surprises me when people go, oh, he's the biggest hero of the thing. It's like, eh, kind of. Yeah.

On the other hand, ew. I mean, don't scrape the romance plot on that one too hard, because what's underneath the chrome is not necessarily, yeah. He's a little... He's unhealthy. He's deeply unhealthy. It's noir. That's what noir means. And he's very easygoing about casual murder.

Yep. And he's very comfortable with making unilateral decisions on behalf of, you know, whoever, really. What does he say? Watch the corners and doors? Doors and corners. Doors and corners. That's where you get to.

Yeah. He's a great character. I don't care what you say. Let's go to Mars. Let's go to Mars. First of all, you've got two more outstanding characters from there who are more favorites of mine. The utterly

badass Bobby Draper, who's a Martian Marine. And Alex. Alex Kamal. Alex, the pilot of our favorite interplanetary spaceship. Is it Rosinante? Am I pronouncing that correctly? Well, if you're mispronouncing it, so am I.

Alright, which we'll get to when we maybe talk a little bit about James Holden and friends. But Mars, tell us what's going on on Mars as the series begins. Again, stealing from history, Mars is the United States. It's the colony that breaks off from its imperial founders and becomes a military power in its own right. If Earth is England, then Mars is sort of the United States. But they're a culture different from the U.S.

in that they're a culture with a singular purpose in a way that we are not. Their purpose is to, at least at the beginning, to terraform arms and to make it a planet you can live on and breathe on and grow plants on. And they have been working on that for, at that point in the books, over a hundred years.

And it's a generational project. We have a character talk about it like a cathedral in the medieval period where the guy who laid the first stones of a cathedral, his great-grandchildren laid the last stones and finished the cathedral. That's great. That generational thinking. One of the great tragedies of the series is that that basis of Martian society gets lost. It gets stripped away. Yeah, and as happens with

everybody over and over and over, history moves past you. And the plans that you had don't necessarily match the plans that the world has for you. If I have a philosophy, it can be boiled down to the universe doesn't care what you think. They're not the best of friends with us down here on old Earth. You take us at least to the brink of war, right, between Earth and Mars? Yep.

It's happened before. I mean, you said if the Martians leave the United States, you've got not just independence, but 1812 and some friction even after that. Part of the story is about imperialism, and when you have two superpowers and then a whole lot of also-rans, you're going to get a lot of jockeying. You're going to get the superpowers sort of bumping each other to assert their control over everything else. And that's, you know, we're fortunate that we never went into an open war with the USSR.

But there were certainly many times when it seemed like we would do that. And there were certainly a lot of proxy wars where the USSR and the United States weren't at war, but there was a war going on in some little country somewhere that was clearly about those two ideologies. It was a locally hot war, even if overall it was cold. Right. So, I mean, that sort of thing, I find it very unbelievable that with two superpowers,

you're not going to have that sort of thing going on. I want to go to Earth by way of, if there is a central character in the story, it is the wonderful James Holden. I mean, I wrote down here on my notes, he's utterly heroic to me, but he's also, what, irritating, eccentric, idealistic. I mean, his only vice seems to be his coffee addiction. I don't know that the people who have to deal with him would agree that that's his only vice.

I think that idealism and that sometimes naive certainty and the irritation, I think those count as vices for folks too. But he keeps getting it right. Before we go there, tell us who James Holden is and why he becomes so wrapped up in saving humanity over and over. His only defining characteristic is he has a hard time accepting authority from himself or from others. His great naivety is that everybody is basically good and if everyone had perfect information, they would make the right decision. His great naivety is that everybody is basically good,

and if everyone had perfect information, they would make the right decision, which is thinking much better of humans than probably most of us do. So the idea that a central authority should tell everyone what is true, he finds that very problematic. What he believes is that don't listen to the authority that's telling you what's true about the universe. Find out for yourself. You'll make the right choice. I know you will. And the other side of that is he's always disappointed. And we talk about him, especially in the books, as being kind of the holy fool. He's the one who's going through the universe constantly trying to do the right thing and be a decent human being.

And sometimes that means being incredibly heroic. And he keeps blundering into getting it right. Well, he gets it wrong a lot too, but he's never ill intentioned. He fails forward. You know, you get things wrong, you get things wrong, you get things wrong. And then you stumble across the thing that was right. A character who always gets everything right is boring. He builds up this little family,

which we should talk about the other members of that family at least briefly, and they have this wonderful home that roams the solar system. Yeah, the Ras Anante. Talk a little bit about that, again, for anybody who is the misfortune of not having the exposure to the Expanse. The Ras Anante is a salvaged Martian warship. Salvaged. Perfectly legitimate.

Not stolen. That's not how the Martian Navy sees it, but okay. No, there's some legal action. We do have some. True. And it is crewed by four, well, between four and six folks throughout the series from Mars, from the Belt, from Earth. They're really the lens that we use to tell the whole story,

and part of the reason we've done that is that it is a crew that is Mars and the Earth and the Belt. All of the factions are represented and become something kind of special because of that. The ship punches above its weight. Often. The two other major characters that we haven't talked about, and I got, there are so many I love, Christian and, what's his name, Fred Johnson. Fred Johnson, yeah.

What a great character. But you've got to talk about Amos and maybe start with Naomi. Naomi is our representative on the ship of the belt. She's an engineer, mostly self-taught, who was part of a radical fringe in the belt that was shooting for belter independence and social justice that has verged off into social injustice on a different scale. We talk about them in terms of Hezbollah and the IRA and people who are militant. She is a recovering militant throughout the books.

She is a recovering militant throughout the books. And as somebody who has seen kind of tribalism through to its logical conclusion and is unimpressed, then Amos is, I don't know, how would you describe Amos? I'll tell you, if anybody beats Joe Miller just for being an absolute delight and full of surprises, it's Amos. Yeah, Amos is my id. I write almost all the Amos dialogue, have done in the books, and now I do on the show. And actually, it's funny, because Wes, who plays Amos on the show,

when a new script comes out, he'll come running up to me and go, you haven't done an Amos pass on this, this isn't right. Which is very flattering. But yeah, he's the guy who lives at the back of my head that i mostly ignore so i'm not in prison he's he's a bit amoral no he yeah he is absolutely amoral uh amos is uh is a guy who is a survivor and is absolutely about solving the problem as quickly as possible um and if you're the problem, then he solves you. And that can be unpleasant. And there's very little animosity there.

It's like, oh, you've made yourself a problem. Now you need to go away. Nothing personal. He's something of a sociopath. And moral in his devotion to what he has found. He has his... We actually dug into this. He has his... We actually... Yeah.

We dug into this. He's not a sociopath. No. He's a... What's the... Profoundly dissociative. Dissociative. Yeah, he has dissociative disorder.

Where you have difficulty making emotional connections to other people and that sort of thing. It's a common result of childhood trauma. Which he had lots of. Which he had. childhood trauma. Which he had lots of. Which he had. When children learn early on that they can never trust anyone, that changes the way their brain works and then they become adults who don't trust anybody and never make connections. We make Amos a little different in that he is aware of what he is because he's very smart. So in the same way that that high functioning sociopaths can build an intellectual conscience rather than an emotional one,

he sort of has built an intellectual conscience for himself where he understands that the things he does are not good. He understands the ways in which he can be better. And even though it's not a thing he does naturally, he sort of has built an aftermarket version of a conscience. Sort of latches onto people who he thinks are good and then is constantly running a subroutine in his head going, what would Naomi do in this situation? Probably not kill that guy. So I'm not going to kill that guy. And that's how he sort of fills in for that.

You mentioned the guy who plays Amos. Wes, he's awesome. To me, everybody on the TV series, those are the faces in my head when I read the books now. It just seems to me like this is some of the best casting ever. It seems like that now. I mean, it seems like that now because they're good. When we first started up the show,

there were a lot of people who were very skeptical and thought we'd done a terrible job. And then the actors stepped into the roles. There's this kind of backwards casting thing that happens where by doing that, we have been able to reframe the books. Because, yeah, I think most people, when they read Amos now, think of Wes, even though they don't actually look the same. Yeah, if you read the of Wes, even though they don't actually look the same. Yeah, if you read the description of the book, they don't actually look anything alike.

But Wes sort of embodies Amos' soul in a way that it doesn't matter. Are there any other characters that you'd like to say something about to the fans here? People always ask, you know, did making the show change the way you think of the characters in the books? And the answer is no. They're very separate things to me, but the one crossover

is Sharia of Dashlu as Vassarala. That is the voice of a Vassarala now. Even when I'm writing Vassarala now, even though they don't look anything alike

when I write, that's the voice I hear in that. She's very good. She is awesome. And tell people about Christiane, she of the foul mouth and great power at the United Nations.

So Christiane Avasarala was our political view into the Expanse universe. She was the deputy undersecretary to the secretary general. I think that's right. When we were planning out the second book, I'll talk about this a little bit. When we were planning out the second book, we had kind of the roles we wanted. We didn't know who the characters were, but we knew we wanted to have the political operative, and we knew we wanted to have the mother who has lost her child

and is a refugee who's trying to get her kid back, and we knew we wanted to have the Marine. One of the things we decided to do was gender flip the expected roles. The Marine is Bobby Draper. The parent who's lost their kid and is trying to track it is Prax, who's a father who's lost a kid. And we took the political powerhouse and made her this little East Indian grandma

who was also channeling Rahm Emanuel. So the way that she moves through the world is by making you uncomfortable, by making you blush first. As we went to cast that, we got Shoray Agdashlu who is this amazing

actor and was able to embody this kind of profoundly powerful human being who just walks in the room and commands the room. It's hers now. She is the queen. She is the queen.

She's been delightful to work with and I think she's been delighted to get to be Christiana Avasarala. I think it's given her permission to do some things she might not have done otherwise. She certainly curses more now than she did when I first met her. She feels much more at home.

Anybody who may have just joined us, I'm Matt Kaplan of Planetary Radio from the Planetary Society, and we are talking with the authors of The Expanse, that wonderful series of books, and now headed into the fourth season of the great TV series that everybody ought to be watching, Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham, and we have a lot of their fans here today. We are here as the guests of the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Throughout everything that you guys have talked about,

you've constantly related the action, the locations, the characters back to our world here in the troubled first part of the 21st century. Clearly, that was something you intended from the start. Anytime you write, you're writing your experience. Even if you're writing about 10,000 years in the future, I mean, Dune, which was written 30,000 years in the future, he's writing about oil, and he's writing about the Middle East, and he's writing about the freedom fighters in the Middle East,

and what happens to your civilization, your culture, when suddenly an incredibly valuable resource is discovered in your home. So he was writing about the time he lived in. And I think everybody does that. You take the things that you know, the time you live in, the things you worry about or think about, and you then project future versions of those. But I don't know how else you write.

And that's part of I mean we were joking but when I say come back in 50 years it's possible that the things that seem really powerful about the books right now that being that they really speak to us as we are living through this moment if if and my fingers are crossed here we solve some of those problems if we move past some of those problems, if it winds up being the things that we've chosen

to build our story on are really of the moment, then we will fade quickly and in a way that would be a blessing because the things we're dealing with at the moment are kind of terrible. If, on the other hand, the future rhymes with history, maybe we'll continue to speak to whatever is happening then. Ray Bradbury's quote about why do you write about such terrible futures,

he said, so that you won't have to live in them. But like all great fiction, your characters are wonderfully complex. There are no pure bad guys, I don't think, or pure good guys in the stories. And in this very technologically advanced future that you write of, human nature doesn't seem to have changed much. You don't think it's going to change much in a couple of hundred years, do you? So humans have existed in basically this shape for, we think, about 150,000 years. And whenever we find stuff that is older than the stuff we had found before, we find tools, we find weapons, we find paintings, it paints a picture of humans that are basically just exactly

like us, but they didn't have smartphones. They didn't have cars. They care about the same things. They worry about the future. So a big influence on my writing and my view of things is, you know, the story of Gilgamesh. And it's one of the earliest stories ever sort of orally transmitted and then eventually written down. And the thing Gilgamesh is worried about is death. He's worried about like his friend has died and will his friend be remembered? And is there a way to avoid death? And how can you

make yourself matter after you're gone? We still worry about that stuff right now. That hasn't changed. And that was first, you know, people were telling that story thousands of years ago. So I don't feel like the things we care about and the things that we want and the things that we get wrong change all that much from generation to generation. Daniel, anything to add? I think it's the same organism. I think the organism does not change. I think the technology around it changes. And that's the ratchet of history. The cyclic part of history is jockeying to see who gets to sit next to the cute guy. I mean, it's what we're doing.

It's what we've always done. I'm going to hold my last couple of questions and go now to our audience, which is loaded with fans of The Expanse. You had said that human nature has been the same for 150,000 years since the existence of dealing with our Neanderthals. Let me restate that. The question is, you talked about we go back 150,000 years, our behavior hasn't changed much. I'm guessing that our precursor hominids probably were also kind of mixed on this issue.

He's asking, you don't think consciousness has evolved somewhat? And he uses the example of the two of you saying you're feminists. I have hope that it does. If I am ever hopeful about anything, that is my hope. I think that we can train ourselves to be better, but I think it takes effort. And I think if you don't put in the effort, if you don't try to be better, the default position is not a great one. Because we very quickly default back to, there's a problem, I should stab it with something pointy. And we've seen a number of times in recent history where civilization has broken down

because of some natural disaster or whatever. And how quickly we go back to stab it with something pointy, take its stuff. It's kind of shocking how fast we go back to that. So yes, I'm very hopeful that we can train ourselves to be better than we are. And I think we do. Do I think that has changed the biology of what we are? I don't think it has yet. I'm the optimist in the group. The formulation I have is the debates that we have about feminism, the debates we have about cultural identity, the debates we have about whether to accept refugees into our culture are debates that we were having before we had written language. The roles of men and women, the roles of gender in society are all conversations that have been going on forever, always. And yeah, we're still having them, and we're going to keep on having them. And we have fumbled forward stupidly, painfully, hurting each other,

and yet also making amazing things and making new progress and capable of tremendous acts of kindness and of generosity. And I don't see the future changing either of those. I don't see the future making us perfect, and I don't see the future making us perfect and I don't see the future making us monstrous. I think we're going to continue bumbling along through the future just the way we have bumbled

along through the past. I will give you one more shot out there since these guys seem to be happy to talk with you, their fans. They seem to be happy to talk. So when you're not producing a television show, what is your writing process? It sounds like you have

a brainstorming session and then we... The writing process when you're not doing the TV show and when can we expect to see the end of The Expanse? The last book. Well, we outline together. We start off by having a very long

outline of a whole book in very simple, like one-line chapter descriptions, most of which is wrong. Then we outline each chapter as we're starting to write it. I hand my stuff to Ty, Ty hands his stuff

to me, we edit each other's stuff, stick it on the master document, and then do the next couple chapters and do the next couple chapters until that big outline is clearly wrong, and then we make another big outline and then keep going until it's done. And yeah, we're working on the last book.

The last book will be out, I expect, next year. It will be out eventually. Again, I'm the optimist. All right, the TV show, the fourth season. And you must be, I mean, what do you have to do for Jeff Bezos whenever you see him? Because he rescued the series from sci-fi. You know, the times we have hung out with Jeff Bezos, we've pretty much just hung out. There were marshmallows.

There were very were marshmallows. There were very good marshmallows. It's a really nice open bar. Yeah. Gets it all on Amazon, I'm sure, by the case. I want to wrap it up and give you the chance to tell us if you wanted

readers and viewers to leave with anything other than feeling they'd had a great time reading or viewing The Expanse, what do you think it what would you want it to be? The philosophy from the books that I think most resonates with me, and it's actually something Daniel wrote

and it pisses me off because it's something he wrote for one of my characters, so it makes me really angry that he came up with this line but one of our characters says we're going to be together all of our lives. We should be gentle with each other. That is sort of, I think, the philosophy of The Expanse. I can't top that.

Wouldn't you also say that one of the major lessons of the entire series, television and books, is stay the hell away from Phoebe? Well, you know, what's your risk tolerance? Well, it is my great pleasure, as a representative of the Planetary Society, and I only have one, I'm afraid, so you'll have to split it, to present you with this genuine piece of Phoebe.

Be careful how you handle it. And you can fight over that, as people do in the books, of course. And there is so much more for you true fans out there who are listening to us or are here with us at the Interplanetary Festival that we could have talked about across this entire wonderful series of eight books so far. We haven't even mentioned the protomolecule

except in that last reference. And boy, does it drive a lot of what is still to come. All I can say is I am a true fan. I cannot wait for the last book or the fourth season. I bet everybody here feels the same way. Please join me in thanking Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank, the creators of The Expanse. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts and What's Up. I know you're a fan of space because you're listening to Planetary Radio right now.

But if you want to take that extra step to be not just a fan, but an advocate, I hope you'll join me, Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate here at the Planetary Society, at our annual Day of Action this February 9th and 10th in Washington, D.C. That's when members from across the country come to D.C. and meet with members of Congress face-to-face and advocate for space. To learn more, go to planetary.org slash dayofaction. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. He is back to talk to us about what's up in the night sky. And I hope to help us celebrate a little bit something that we knew was coming, but we

couldn't talk about when I talked to Bill Nye a couple of weeks ago about about LightSail 2. We've gotten another award. We did indeed. Indeed. Popular Science has chosen LightSail 2 as its grand award winner in aerospace for the top innovations in 2019. And we beat out some pretty big competitions. So we're quite proud of that. Yeah, I hope that, you know, people at Boeing and SpaceX and elsewhere are still going to talk to us after this because we beat all of them. Maybe they won't notice.

Anyway, it is quite an accomplishment. And we thank Popular Science. And thank you to you and the rest of the team for once again proving that we were on to something great with this. Yeah. with this. Yeah, worked out well and we're still flying and still tweaking issues and still figuring out how to solar sail more efficiently as we slowly, slowly drop closer due to atmospheric drag. Well, we don't want to go there just yet. No, no. Let's go on up to the night sky. In the night sky in the evening, Venus getting higher, super bright, brightest star-like object out there in the west in the early evening. Below that now, just below it is Saturn looking yellowish, and it will continue dropping, so check it out.

In the pre-dawn sky, you got Mars over in the east looking reddish into its upper right speaker, the bluish star of Virgo. And if you're catching this early on, Geminids meteor shower peaks December 13th, 14th. It's got a full moon this year, so it won't be as spectacular, but it is on average the best meteor shower of the year. So if you have some patience, you should be able to still check things out and even for a couple days after that. On to this week in space history. It was 1972 that Apollo 17 successfully landed and left the moon, the final humans to visit the moon, 1972. The end of the Apollo 50th anniversary season is still three years away. So we got a ways to go.

And depending on whether you count the Apollo-Soyuz test program, even another three years. But we'll argue that in three years. Okay. We like to plan our arguments ahead of time. Figure out who takes which side. I don't know. It's much safer this way. On to random space fact.

Just didn't have the energy in it today. Sorry. So we're going to start with some definitions and move to something quite interesting. It's the old solar day versus sidereal day. A solar day is how long it takes an object to have the sun come back up to the same point in the sky. So like one noon to another noon, it's 24 hours on earth. A sidereal day is how long it takes the object to rotate relative to the fixed stars. So not counting the orbit around the sun. And so for earth, that's 23 hours and 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds. Okay, that's interesting, but they're really close.

But you get really weird when you talk like about some other planets, say Venus. It takes 243 days to rotate on a sidereal day, rotate on its axis relative to the fixed stars. Takes only 116 days, 117 to do a solar day for the sun to come back to the same point in the sky. Of course, there is a catch with Venus that if you were on the surface and survived and didn't melt, you couldn't see the sun anyway. So I don't know what the point of this whole exercise was. Well, I don't know. It may matter to the Venusians. All right.

We move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, what is the largest known object in our solar system that has not been visited by a spacecraft with notes, flybys, count as visits, and we are not counting the sun. How'd we do, Matt? We had a minority of respondents who thought it was Pallas, that asteroid in the belt, right? Yeah, Pallas is much smaller and it is next in line since we've done Ceres and Vesta, it's next in line for an asteroid, but the asteroids are much smaller than those things way out in the outer solar system, at least the largest of them. So here's the one I think you wanted.

And I'm going to read this from a friend of the Planetary Society, friend of Planetary Radio, one of our volunteers who's a regular listener and entrant in the contest, Ocean McIntyre, here in SoCal, Southern California. Excellent. Eris is the largest named object in the solar system Ocean McIntyre here in SoCal, Southern California. Excellent. Eris is the largest named object in the solar system that has not been visited. And then she put in parentheses, unless you mean planet nine, but since it hasn't been physically seen, shrug, she writes out. I wouldn't count it as known, but it is maybe there. We're hoping. Yeah, well, you know, science point two. She's right, but our winner is Royal Snotterley.

Royal Snotterley up in Ketchikan, Alaska. It has been almost two years since Royal's last win. He agreed that Eris is that largest known object in our solar system that has not yet been visited by a spacecraft. I guess there aren't any in any other solar systems that have been visited. So not by us anyway. No, not by us anyway. Royal, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt that you can check out in the Planetary Society store at chopshopstore.com.

I like it a lot. I wear it. Anyway, we also got from Mel Powell, also in Southern California. He says, although at 884-ish episodes, that's 17 by 52, the vault of high-quality, big fun, lots of learning planetary radio episodes might be slightly larger than Eris, but he's unaware of any flybys of that vault. Yes, we keep all of them in a vault or in a medically sealed pickle jar on Funk and Wagner's porch.

Yeah, they only let me out in time to do the show each week. And we're wondering about that, frankly. From Ontario, not the one in Southern California, the one that is up north of here. Esen Beglu, he says, Eris was named after the Greek goddess of strife and discord. It hasn't been or will be visited by a spacecraft. That's punishment for what it did to Pluto. It only gets to be photographed by good old Hubble. Some people need to get over their grudge. And along those same lines from our poet laureate Dave Fairchild in Kansas. Now Eris is the goddess

known for strife and epithet, her planetoids the biggest that we haven't been to yet, and Eris was the reason why dear Pluto moved on down, demoted to a dwarvish size by Pluto killer Brown. Mike Brown, of course, at Caltech, the discoverer of Eris and a lot of other stuff that's way out there in the solar system. We're ready for another one. Happy Planetary Society anniversary, Matt. Yay. We're 40 years old as of November 30th. The Articles of Incorporation were filed in 1979. So for a 40-year-old Planetary Society, exactly 40 Earth years old, how old is the Planetary

Society in Mercurian years? What anniversary approximately would be celebrating in Mercurian years? Assume the planetary society to be 40 earth years. Exactly. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I'm sure it's much more impressive than it would be in Neptunian years. Yeah. I'm sure it's much more impressive than it would be in Neptunian years. Yeah, we're still quite the infants in Neptunian years. You have until the 18th.

That would be December 18, 2019 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer and win yourself, okay, a Planetary Radio t-shirt at chopshopstore.com. But wait, wait, there's more. You know why? Because Bruce Betts has written a new book. And I'm looking at it right now in Amazon. We'll put up the link to it here in Amazon or someplace. It's the VR or Virtual Reality Space Explorers, subtitle Titans Black Cat. And it's cute.

I like it. It looks like the first of maybe a series. Well, here's hoping. Here's hoping. It's a fictional group of kids in the future who take virtual reality tours with their hologram and robotic dog to fun places in the solar system. You mean their hologram who happens to be named Dr. Bruce and really doesn't look much like you. Lucky for you. Funny story.

They decided that kids didn't respond well enough to the Dr. Bruce prototype that looked like me. So now Dr. Bruce is glowing green with a mustache and eyeglasses. Big round eyeglasses, yeah. Anyway, it's fun. That'll be yours too, that and the shirt, if you're chosen by random.org as this new contest winner. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky,

and think about what type of noise they could use for backup sounds on trucks that would be more amusing than just beeping. Thank you and good night. Get Back by the Beatles. Nice. That's Bruce Betts. He is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its expansive members. Join us at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Ad expanse.