The Expanse authors discuss the final ending of the book series

For 10 years, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck have been writing The Expanse series of books, tracing the adventures of James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante as they deal with interplanetary politics, separatist terrorists and finally a race of alien beings intent on subsuming humanity into their hive mind. The final book in the series, Leviathan Falls, came out just last month, and Abraham and Franck talked to Polygon all about it.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE EXPANSE BOOKS BEYOND THIS POINT

The end of The Expanse

So what happens at the end of all things? Well, in order to stop the ring builders from flattening the nature of human existence, James Holden injects himself with the alien protomolecule to let his friends escape the ring gate and finally destroy the rings himself, making an executive decision on behalf of humanity in order to save it, even though he spent much of the book series fighting against people who wanted to do exactly that.

“What we were trying to do was take this very righteous guy with a very strong opinion and spiral him through more and more experiences, depth, uncertainty, and gray until we had him still very much himself, but at a place where he could make this impossible choice, this choice on behalf of everyone, when that’s exactly what he didn’t ever want to do,” Abraham said. “And we did that with a bunch of other characters too. If you look at Naomi, she was trying not to be a leader. She was trying to hide behind her hair in the first book. That’s not where she wound up.”

Naomi Nagata, by the way, gets the last line of the book, which the authors apparently had in mind since very near the beginning of the series: “The stars are still there. We’ll find our own way back to them.”

The only character who didn’t change in this way was Amos Burton, on account of his implacable personality. “Amos is only one thing, and he’s only ever going to be one thing,” Franck said. “And it turns out that that one thing is very tough to kill.” That said, he does now have a new role: the guy who guides humanity into the next age. As Franck puts it:

"[A]s a guide for a broken humanity, he seems like a guy, as Daniel said, without sentimentality. So he’s going to say, “Stop being such dipshits.” And when they don’t stop being a bunch of dipshits, he’s going to kill all the ones that are necessary to get everybody else back on board. […] He just seems like the perfect person to do that."

The Ring Builders step out of the shadows

Leviathan Falls also tells us more about the alien ring builders than we ever knew before, although there’s plenty about them that’s still mysterious. “We knew a lot about the evolutionary history of the gate builders and how their biology affected what they did, how they saw things differently, and the strategy that we saw in book one of hijacking other life and using that and incorporating it, “Abraham said. “So all of that was actually pretty well thought out. It was just finding a way to explain it that wasn’t just a graduate lecture. And the ring entities, they were always supposed to be mysterious. They were always supposed to be the dark gods. I know that there are folks who really like having all of the answers, and that’s great, but I don’t think it’s ever satisfying.”

So it this all there is to The Expanse? Well, yes and no. On the page, the novella The Sins of Our Fathers will appear in the upcoming anthology book Memory’s Legion. “It’s a bit of a coda to the series,” Franck said. “It’s probably not what people are expecting, but that’s OK. In some ways, it is the conversation about what you have to do next. Daniel talked about the 1,300 chances to get it right, and it is just one little story of one of those 1,300 chances of somebody trying to get it right.”

Beyond that, the two don’t see themselves returning to The Expanse universe. “What I do hope is that folks who are hungry for more grab the role-playing game or start writing their own stuff…and keep the literary conversation going,” Abraham said. “That would be how I would want to see this. I wouldn’t want to see another Expanse book.”

Will The Expanse TV show ever adapt Leviathan Falls?

The Expanse isn’t just a book series; it’s also a TV show about to premiere its sixth and final season on December 10, this Friday.

The problem is that the sixth season adapts the sixth book in the series, Babylon’s Ashes, but Leviathan Falls is the ninth. Will we ever see the final three books up on the screen?

Well, this upcoming season will be the last one on Amazon Prime Video…but that doesn’t mean it’s the last one period. The producers have hinted that they may try to find the series a new home elsewhere, so fans shouldn’t give up hope just yet…

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