this June.
The books are hard-core space opera thrillers with aliens, battles between vehicles in space, humans living in varying gravities throughout the solar system. One review of the first book said "As close as you'll get to a Hollywood blockbuster in book form" so it is interesting that word comes this week that SyFy has announced that it is ordering a full10-episode first season (not just a pilot) of a television adaptation of The Expanse.
Entertainment Weekly reports:
Syfy has given a direct-to-series order to an exciting-sounding new project based on an acclaimed sci-fi book series. The cable network has ordered 10 episodes of The Expanse, from Academy Award-nominated screenwriting duo Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (Children of Men, Iron Man) and Alcon Television Group. The project has been described by industry insiders as “Game of Thrones in space” — not so much because of the specifics of the plot, but because it tells a dramatic sprawling grown-up story within a popular fantasy genre that’s based on a respected series of novels.
The logline: “A thriller set two hundred years in the future, The Expanse follows the case of a missing young woman who brings a hardened detective and a rogue ship’s captain together in a race across the solar system to expose the greatest conspiracy in human history.”
The Expanse is based on a series of books by James S.A. Corey. The most well-known title is probably the first in the series, Leviathan Wakes, which has been praised for reinventing and updating the old-school Star Wars/Firefly-style space opera. Syfy won a bidding war with another content producer to acquire the project.
Syfy president Dave Howe promised, “The Expanse is epic in scale and scope and promises to be Syfy’s most ambitious series to date. Bringing this coveted book franchise to television with our partners at Alcon and the Sean Daniel Company is a giant win for Syfy, reinforcing our overall strategy to produce bold, provocative and compelling sci-fi fantasy stories. The Expanse joins a killer line-up of high-concept, high quality series, along with recently announced original projects Ascension, 12 Monkeys, the renewal of Helix, and the soon to premiere Dominion.
There's still a lot that needs to go write to make a show that will be as significant as Game of Thrones is for HBO out of The Expanse. The source material is excellent, so if they found people to make an excellent show of Battlestar Galactica, hopefully they can do as good a job here.
To me it's personally exciting because soon more people will know about these fantastic books, and perhaps space-opera science fiction will get more respect as a cultural product.
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