The Expanse author talks the end of the series, possible spinoff shows

The Expanse author James S.A. Corey REALLY doesn’t want to make a prequel. Also, he knows when season 5 is coming.

Despite getting cancelled on SyFy after three seasons, The Expanse is still trucking, with Amazon swooping in and saving the fan favorite sci-fi show from an early end, much to the delight of its many fans.

And the show deserved to be saved. Based on a series of novels by James S.A. Corey, The Expanse is brainy, ambitious, and gripping, marrying hard sci-fi concepts to a twisty plot that has sometimes earned it the title of “Game of Thrones in space.”

And there’s a lot of it to go around, too. There are eight novels currently published, with a ninth and final one on the way next year. So far, the show has adapted the books at about a rate of one per season, with the most recent fourth season covering the events of Cibola Burn and the upcoming fifth adapting Nemesis Games.

That’s a pretty clear roadmap, right? But while James S.A. Corey (which is actually a pen name for the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) confirmed on Twitter that the plan is to wrap up the book series next year, he’s not sure what the TV show is going to do.

“It is our intention to end the novel series at that point, and always has been,” Corey wrote. “What [production company] Alcon wants to do with the TV show is up to them.”

So are we talking spinoffs? Corey said that, contractually, he wasn’t obligated to do anything with possible TV series or movies that are made beyond the end of the original show. “But if there were future TV or Film projects that they wanted me to work on, I’d decide then if I liked the idea of the project enough to join.”

That said, it doesn’t sound like Corey would be very interested in a prequel show or movie of any kind. “Everything in that gap is boring and the ending is rote because you know everyone has to be alive and in basically the same spot for the next books to happen,” he wrote. “It means everything requires a big reset at the end. It’s why I hate prequels.”

"It’s a style of storytelling I generally dislike. I’d never want to write that type of show. Having said that, if Alcon wants that type of show they can make it."

It’s true that prequels have a built-in ending, but I disagree that they’re boring by nature. I think Better Call Saul over on AMC is the leading example of a prequel story that’s not only thrilling, but maybe even better than the show it was spun off from, in this case Breaking Bad. But you keep living your truth, James S.A. Corey.

Shifting back to The Expanse, Corey weighed in on the recent conversation around long waits for sci-fi and fantasy books. While fans of authors like George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss have been waiting almost a decade for new entries in the A Song of Ice and Fire series and The Kingkiller Chronicle respectively, Corey has been putting out new Expanse books at a steady clip since Leviathan Wakes debuted back in 2011. Why the difference?

“That was a lot easier when writing Expanse books was our only job,” Corey wrote. “The last few years have added a lot of other stuff, and the process has slowed a bit. I can’t imagine juggling novel writing and all the distractions a Martin or Rothfuss deals with.”

And as fast as Corey writes, Amazon may be producing the show even faster. The fourth season of the show dropped (all at once) on December 12, and filming on season 5 wrapped up before the coronavirus pandemic forced most of Hollywood to shut down. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw it before the end of the year.

For the record, Corey has been told a release date for season 5, but he isn’t sharing. Watch this space.

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h/t Newsweek