On November 30th, the final book in The Expanse series will be published. On December 10th, the sixth season of the series adaptation begins its six-episode closing run. Watching the latest trailer for this final season, I had a lot of thoughts—Drummer, you can’t make me cry in a trailer; why does Avasarala look so serene, where are her swears; what the HELL was that??!?—but among them, one question rose to the top. Which am I going to finish first? The books or the adaptation?
This is a particularly weird question where The Expanse is concerned because the series will never really catch up to the books, which do a serious time jump in book seven. The series, we expect, ends around the end of book six, mostly. Sort of. I think. (It also involves a novella that seems more closely tied to the last three books.) But will there be spoilers in the show? If I finish the last book before December 10th, will I be distracted by what I know about the end of the series? Which one do I want to have more chance of surprising me?
Would the answer to this be more obvious to me if I’d started reading the books before watching the series?
Children of Men proved beyond any doubt that the book isn’t always better. There really aren’t any “always” rules where books and adaptations are concerned. You don’t have to read the source material before you see the adaptation. You never have to read the source material if you don’t want to. Maybe the movie or series is a really good trailer for the book(s), which would take so much longer to read. Maybe you just test out an episode, see what you think.
But if you do want both, the page and the screen, you always have a choice to make—and it always changes the experience. You can’t go back and unsee an adaptation or unread a book. Time will pass, and if there’s one thing I almost definitely don’t recommend, it’s rereading a book right before the adaptation arrives. That path leads to suffering and distraction. That is the path on which you see all the things the movie left out, all the characters who didn’t look right, all the subplots and hijinks a series could never fit in. If you kind of remember a book and there’s an adaptation coming, wait for the adaptation. Then reread it if you still want to fill in the blanks. (Or, in the case of Dune, decide if you want to reread the book before the second movie.)
Both The Expanse and Game of Thrones are TV series based on book series I never expected I’d want to read. A Song of Ice and Fire just missed me; I read seemingly every other chunky fantasy series from that era, but somehow didn’t notice George R. R. Martin’s fat novels. The Expanse was more a case of me being an idiot and thinking I wasn’t that interested in long volumes of space politics. These books have very brief summaries on the covers. I didn’t really know what they were about. I had no idea what I was missing until I got fully sucked in by the adaptation.
When you watch the series first, there are obvious differences in the reading experience. If, like me, you visualize what you read, you’re mostly stuck with the adaptation’s casting. It’s really hard to rewrite those images and faces, to clean the mental slate and conjure up your own notions of what the characters might have looked like in your mind. Even when I read ahead of The Expanse, as the show went on I wound up rewriting my mental Bobbie Draper with Frankie Adams, my imagined Anna Volovodov with Elizabeth Mitchell.
There are inevitably characters who don’t make it into the adaptation, locations you never get to visit. There is always more to imagine. But it’s in the colors and styles of the adaptation, isn’t it? What would those ring gates look like had I never seen them on a screen? But would I have given the books a chance if I didn’t fall for the chemistry among the actors, the perfect rasp of Shohreh Aghdashloo’s Chrisjen Avasarala, the way Wes Chatham carries himself as Amos?
You can love the adaptation better because it brings you something you didn’t expect, and you can love the books better because they always have more to give you. Or you can love neither; as much as anyone, I want to know how Martin is going to end A Song of Ice and Fire, but I wouldn’t say I love the books. And I certainly didn’t love the ending of the series. It’s all but guaranteed the final book—whenever we get to read it—will be more satisfying.
Is Peter Jackson’s triumphant Lord of the Rings series the best book-to-screen adaptation? It’s certainly the one that feels, to me, most like its source material—which has as much to do with the involvement of artists John Howe and Alan Lee as anything. For someone who grew up with Howe and Lee calendars on the wall, Jackson’s vision looks as close as anything to what lived inside my head. But what does it look like if your own vision wasn’t steeped in those artists’ work? Does it still look just right?
Adaptations that veer further from their source material are trickier yet. If you read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians after watching Sera Gamble and John McNamara’s The Magicians series, your expectations of the book and its sequels might be all kinds of screwy. Knowing the books before watching the series left me with an occasional quibble (or moment of confusion), but I came to love the way the adaptation gave the characters a new path. They started out in the same place, but where things went grew bigger and more expansive than the novels. It’s a retelling as much as anything.
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The Eye of the World: Book One of The Wheel of Time
There’s room in our minds—and bookish hearts—for the original work and the many things that may follow from it, though some adaptations can make that harder to remember. I still struggle with Wicked, the musical, which to me misses half the point of the book. Some people can’t stand the Studio Ghibli Howl’s Moving Castle; I love it and the Diana Wynne Jones book on which it’s based, though they feel like entirely different beasts.
The desire to see the stories we love told in a different medium can be at war with the desire to love them the way they are—and the wish that other people would experience them the same way. There are books I’m secretly not sure I ever want to see adapted, and series where I’m never going to read the source material (I am looking The Witcher square in the face. Still undecided on Foundation). I’ve never read The Wheel of Time; will the imminent series finally convince me to pick up the books? Or are 14 high fantasy novels more than I can possibly tackle right now?
For that matter, are two chunky Expanse novels also more than I can tackle right now? I was waiting to read Tiamat’s Wrath until Leviathan Falls was almost here, and maybe I waited too long. (Or maybe one of those books is what Thanksgiving weekend is for.) One won’t “spoil” the other. I’ve never not enjoyed a movie because I’d already read the book and knew what was going to happen. It happens differently, no matter what. Maybe an actor delivers a line a way you never heard it in your head. Maybe a character in the adaptation is made up of bits of several characters and their own magic, and you love them best of all. The book has so many more details, and you can take all the time you want to catch them all, no pause-and-rewinding required.
There’s no either/or here, just a question of which comes first. And sometimes that question is just very hard to answer.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
The TV version of The Expanse is definitely one of the better adaptations I’ve seen. In some ways it’s slightly better paced in the way it introduces some characters earlier, rather than dropping them in at the start of a new book. It also does a good job of streamlining several characters into one, Drummer in the show is a composite of several characters in the books, but Cara Gee’s Drummer is bloody fantastic.
Neil Gaiman’s adaptation of Good Omens was really good, and yet the adaptation of American Gods was spotty and inconsistent (it seems there was some studio politics going on there).
Oh, and I’m going to be reading Leviathan Falls as soon as it comes out, in my head it’s a separate entity from the TV series.
I don’t (always) adhere to the “accept that cinema and literature are two different art forms with two different structures,” but when I don’t, strangely I prefer the movie version.
I read and loved and re-read and re-read Tolkien, but damn if Jackson’s version isn’t just plain tighter in all the best ways. There’s no Bombadil bloat and Scouring denoument (that’s mostly evocative of returning to England after nearly dying at the Somme). Even the “Director’s Cut” is a little bloaty, proof that time limits CAN fuel creativity. I’ve consumed all three versions of LotR, but whenever a newbie needs to see it, it’s the theatrical cut that I pull out.
Likewise Dune. Villenueve absolutely “Jackson”ed Dune. My wife dislikes Herbert, cansidering him at best an average writer (not entirely unfair from a dialog and character depth standpoint, if missing the point that his plotting and metaphor and worldbuilding was excellent), but she loved Dune. AND followed everything that went on. There’s more Dune the book in Dune the movie than LotR the book in LotR the movie, but that’s fair. Herbert was after a certain amount of brevity that did not factor in the slightest to Tolkien.
Take for example, Pieter deVries…never even named in the movie and it was not the worse for it. I thought back and Pieter wasn’t a character so much as he was a walking exposition dump, starting almost every, “As you know…,” conversation with the Baron in the book.
Heresy, I know, but I’ve rarely found a movie version of a book to be a monumental letdown, but I have been uninterested in the books underlying certain movies.
I’ve always viewed movies and TV shows as an edited version of the book. In some cases the book needed editing and the movie, by tightening or simplifying, was better. See, for example, Game of Thrones or Dune.
In other cases the book needed updating due to changing social values. Foundation falls in this category and we shall have to see how the show goes.
But in many cases the books were perfect as is and the shows can only hope to be as good. Some are, and The Expanse seems to approach this, but most are, at best, disappointing and, at worst, a dumpster fire like The Watch which ruined Pratchett’s books in every way possible.
I agree that adaptations tend to be a tricky business.
The exact same team of director/writers did a great job with Lord of the Rings and botched The Hobbit beyond any possible recognition.
I loved Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle without having read the book. When I did read it, I was more than a little puzzled about the changes, but in the end I still love both; they are, like Ms. Templeton eloquently puts it, “entirely different beasts.”
I loved the Magician books (despite some minor annoyances), and liked the adaptation (particularly Julia’s journey) until a point where I just felt it was going in an entirely different direction, and moreover one that did not particularly appeal to me; it just got too soap-operish. (Also, and this is completely irrational, the actor who played Quentin reminded me unpleasantly of a cousin of mine. Don’t ask.)
I have not read the Expanse books, but I am so impressed by the series (maybe one of the very best SF series ever made, if not the very best) that I plan to start reading them as soon as I finish watching the series.
I watched the show first until season 3 then plowed through all the books, including the shorter works. Personally I think in this particular universe I would watch the shows and read later, the reason being that the books are just so well written I enjoyed them for what they were. The differences were more like “oh, interesting!” I might like the increased detail of the book or I might prefer what they did with the series(like the character of Elvi), but it feels like less stress than a lot of the book reader conversations, which tend to get more worked up about what was changed, as if the show somehow broke canon. At this point anyway, I’d plow through the series and watch the new season, then prepared to be entertained with the books all on their own.
But yeah, depending on the property, that rule can change.
I constantly agonize over the question of book or show first! I was a smug “book reader” in our GoT watch group, and eagerly watched everyone experience the Red Wedding for the first time. I am an annoying book reader when my husband and I watch The Expanse – he REFUSES to allow me to speak during the episodes because I might give something away about the protomolecule (he cares nothing for space politics and everything for alien encounters). I loved The Magicians trilogy and was fully obsessed and weirdly possessive of the Netflix adaptation. And I am currently waiting for The Witcher season 2 before I read the novels it was based on. My point being, I am usually Book Girl, but I find so much to love about this explosion of fantasy adaptations, including the opportunity to talk to non-fantasy readers about the stories and characters I love, especially when they are executed super well.
Movies, on the other hand – I may be the only person in the world who hated the LotR trilogy, I am uninterested in seeing Dune, thought the Harry Potter films were terrible. My two cents is, if you’re going to adapt a book and do the worldbuilding/characters/myriad plots justice, give it some room (at least 8 episodes!) to breathe!
I normally avoid as much talk and promotion of shows as possible, even when I’m familiar with the source material. Didn’t even read the entire article (sorry, Molly). This is the first time I’ve heard there will be only six episodes, which is an even bigger disappointment than it getting only six seasons. As for reading vs watching, I had read the first four novels and several of the shorter works before the show began, so didn’t have any reason to not continue reading. I started a re-read of Tiamat’s Wrath last night, will follow up with Auberon, and Leviathan Falls should drop on my Kindle about 11pm Central time next Monday night. I’ll read as much as I can that night, and finish as quickly as possible. Yet I still won’t have read all of the story before Season 6 ends, since there will be another novella out next March.
I love that you mention a retelling of the stories, because that is the only way I can stop my nitpicking pedantic inner voice from pointing out all the things that the movie or series Got That Wrong. It’s not wrong when it’s just another perspective, sort of like when an author has different characters talk about the same events as each one experienced it.
After reading the physical book for the first of the series I am listening to The Expanse books on audio, they have been my commuting and business trip companions for a year now and as I finish Tiamat’s Wrath I have no idea what to listen to next when this is over. Additionally I highly recommend the Audible versions. Even if the voices in my head and the voices I am listening to and the voices I see and hear on the screen are different my love for these stories allows me accept it all as part of that world.
Also, Powell’s books is hosting a video event soon with the authors and Ann Leckie to talk about the last Expanse book.
Also again, I was working at a small Waldenbooks book signing years ago and Robert Jordan was trying to get me to read his first book in the series, as the second had just come out. My spouse pounced on the signed copy I brought home, but I never read it. Loved the day I spent talking to Robert though.
Game of Thrones first season got me very excited to read the books, which I did very quickly before realizing I was a Sweet Summer Child thinking #6 and #7 will be released. The show was a very good adaption in my opinion, up until season 5 and beyond, where it became so bad that it actually made me lose interest in GRRM’s incredibly rich world.
Now even if he does release the next books they will always be tainted by the horrible last few seasons, not just because they were garbage, but because it feels wrong to learn such huge plot points from an adaptation vs the original source material. Can you say you’re excited for Jon Snow’s big reveal now, or any of the other story arcs coming to full realization?
As far as the Expanse, I am excited for the last book and have really enjoyed the whole series. The TV adaptation has been enjoyable as well, and I guess I am more forgiving of all that was left out because they keep the story pretty tight, and the quality has remained consistent. I will finish the book series before watching the last season, and really wish they were planning a couple more seasons to truly finish the epic.
I always read the book/s first. I wasn’t aware that was a question.
OK, it depends what’s an adaptation of what–sometimes, they make books out of movies, in which case the original thing comes first. Although by a twist of fate, I actually read the book Star Wars before the movie came out . . . at the time, 12 year old me didn’t actually believe the thing on the cover saying “Soon to be a major motion picture!” I was kind of surprised later that year when suddenly what I saw as a middling-at-best space opera was actually there on the big screen!
Very pleased book 9 is coming out soon. I’ll definitely read it before watching the final season of The Expanse. I’ve enjoyed both versions of The Expanse a lot.
I’m a bigger fan of Good Omens and American Gods as their telly versions than the book versions. (And I enjoyed The Watch, but not because it was a great adaptation of the original concept – it wasn’t.)
I’m a big Roald Dahl fan and have enjoyed most of the movie adaptations, though I think the one that rang truest to the original novel for me was Danny The Champion of the World. Meanwhile I’ve still not been able to rewatch Fantastic Mr Fox to give it a second chance.
Commenter #8, Heather, said “as I finish Tiamat’s Wrath I have no idea what to listen to next when this is over.”
My suggestion would be the Rivers of London books by Ben Aaronovitch. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith does an amazing job as the narrator of those books. It’s the only book series that I buy both the books and the audiobooks for. (Read ’em myself, then let Kobna read ’em to me next.)
Long time lurker, first time poster!
I just can’t resist not posting about my excitement for The Expanse. I truly never thought something else would come along and not only take a top spot for me in the sci-fi universe (have always put Star Trek at the top, but realizing what it’s become and analyzing how bad a lot of episodes are has soured me a bit). I actually never thought something would take my love of Firefly and completely eclipse it!
The Expanse books and the Expanse tv show have both been so amazing, it’s been a while since I’ve found a series that just scratches that itch and both versions here do so in spades. The books obviously provide some amazing description and background but the show, even from the lower-budget days of being on SyFy, the world is just so nicely realized and I love that they didn’t just cram one book’s worth of story into one season. Having book 1’s story continue seamlessly into season 2 just allowed it all to feel like the story just keeps going instead of comes to a forced conclusion.
Getting to see the actors and actresses bring the characters to life have made me just love it all the more. Admittedly, I thought Steven Strait (Holden) was sort of a poor man’s Kit Harrington (Jon Snow, GoT) and Amos was a sort of poor man’s Jayne Cobb (Adam Baldwin). How I’m glad I’ve changed that thinking, they’ve been so great and really become nestled into my book character heart.
I’m about to start reading Tiamat’s Wrath once I finish some of the novellas in the series and I have a feeling I won’t be able to put off reading Leviathan Falls for long after that. I’m excited to see how this epic story ends. And as much as I hate that the tv show is ending so early after having found a new home and new life on Amazon, at least we’ve got the books to finish the story unlike Martin’s Game of Thrones. Much as someone above mentioned, the show has soured me on his world that I so loved and have lost all enthusiasm for the next book, but who am I kidding, if it finally releases, it’s likely still a day 1 purchase.
Thanks for bearing with my long comment, always happy to see so many others that are as passionate about The Expanse as I’ve become!