The great jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis once told an interviewer: "There's only freedom in structure, my man. There's no freedom in freedom."
He meant that when an artist chooses to work within the structure of something like a sonata or a three-act play, their creativity can actually be heightened. Constraints, ironically, can lead to freedom. And what's true of music and theater is equally true of fiction, as we are seeing in the second season of SyFy's epic series The Expanse.
Last year, I wrote two pieces on Season 1 of the Expanse. The first came before the show aired and was my plea to show runners not to screw-up my favorite science-fiction book series. The second came after the season was well underway, and I happily reported the show was nothing short of the best science-fiction show in a decade.
I am, once again, happy to say the new season is just as good — and getting better.
While there are moments of uneven pacing, overall The Expanse continues to build a story as wide as the solar system and, yet, as personal as the bonds between friends, lovers and enemies. It is awesome!
But from my place as a scientist, what is most remarkable about the show's development is its realism. More than any other TV space-themed show, it gets the science right. It does this because it has to — and that's what makes it interesting. The Expanse imposes constraints on itself that are the real rules of real physics. That's a key point because, in many ways, The Expanse is the first real attempt to map out in TV fiction the "world" we'll face as we begin working our way off Earth.
The Expanse takes place 200 years in the future when humanity has settled Mars, the asteroid belt and the moons of the giant planets. That means gravity (or lack of it) and space travel constitute an essential constraint on the characters' lives. Instead of dreaming up some kind of "artificial gravity" as most science-fiction does, the story lives in the real world where thrust (i.e. engines turned on) means the floor is pushed against your feet. It feels like you're standing on a planet. A spinning space station can also produce a gravity-like effect (you walk on the inside of a spinning tube). But without thrust or spin, you are floating, weightless.
Read More:
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/03/28/521748974/the-expanse-how-great-science-fiction-preps-us-for-the-future
