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johnnyFive  ·  2571 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sci-Fi club no. 30 material selection thread

I would vote for The Expanse. I've read all but the most recent books, and have seen the first season of the show (am into the second one now).

It's a near(ish) future space opera with some interesting geopolitical background. Basically you have Earth and Mars as the major powers in the solar system. Meanwhile, there's a separate ethnicity of a sort called Belters, who are people that grew up in space and in small asteroid colonies. Because they don't have the technology for artificial gravity, Belters tend to be taller, skinnier, and have relatively brittle bones. They're also seen by Earth and Mars about the same as Roma are by the rest of Europe. They have a very mixed culture, representing the fact that folks from all over were the original settlers. Earth is Earth, while Martians sound like Texans because that was who the first settlers were. (In the show, they look physically the same, but tend to have lots of accents. The show did do a good job of capturing the Belters' patois, though).

So you have some Cold War-style tensions between the planets, plus the Belters stirring things up since they're getting sick of being treated as second-class citizens. Then a bizarre Science Thing happens. So imagine the Cold War, only neither side discovered nukes themselves, but sort of found one lying around in the Sahara.

The show does a good job of adapting the books. It's well-acted, and the special effects are what-not are great.