There’s no debating that Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s Expanse novels changed the space opera game. Starting with Leviathan Wakes in 2011, the complex story of a future version of the solar system redefined what mainstream, fast-paced epic science fiction could be like. Quickly, those books were saddled with the slightly unfortunate tag of “Game of Thrones in space,” which was really only true because there were a lot of characters and factions. And, in a world in which Battlestar Galactica had just ended in 2009, it made sense that the SyFy Channel would be looking for what was, in essence, the next Battlestar Galactica.
And yet, the two point-of-view characters in the very first novel, James Holden and Joe Miller, are not, in the grand scheme of characters, the most exciting or original; one is a self-righteous space guy, and the other one an old-school detective. This works fine for the first book, as the world-building of the Belt is slowly revealed through fairly narrow POVs. But, when the TV version of The Expanse debuted on December 14, 2015, the series correctly made one major change: Introducing a crucial character from the second book much earlier, and making her central to the larger story.
