Tobias Revell

MUNDANE PERIL: FOUNDATION AND THE EXPANSE HOLD A LESSON FOR FUTURISTS.

TV Show Review

By Tobias Revell

WITH Philip K. Dick’s back catalogue now thoroughly exhausted by studio executives, the last few years have seen the adaptation of several other cornerstone science fiction books into cinematically-produced outputs. The contemporary popularity of science fiction and fantasy has inflated budgets past the inglorious days of Battlestar Galactica’s (2004-2009) kitschy and gloomy sets into large-scale CGI set piece space battles and glossy vistas.

Foundation (2021), set tens of thousands of years in the future, with humanity’s empire spanning the Milky Way, was Apple TV’s attempt at cashing in on the sci-fi streaming market. The adaptation of Isaac A. Asimov’s Golden Age classic (1942) was expected to be a smash hit but ultimately failed to amaze viewers and reviewers with most commenting on the disconnect between the scale of the books and the TV. The books sprawl thousands of years and millions of light years, largely capitalising

on the reader’s imagination at a scale that doesn’t lend itself easily to the screen. Television is character-driven and as a friend commented (I paraphrase): ‘Asimov never had to worry about characters because the world was so big, and they were so small.’ It’s this scale that made it hard to care for the characters – there’s very little sense of peril. When a character needs to travel, it’s safe and nearly instant, when a character’s life is under threat there’s always a nano-gizmo that will fix it. And the scale of events pushes the lives of the individual characters into the background. The series’ climactic event involves the deaths, we’re told, of tens of millions. But at this scale, it’s hard to feel sympathy. What is life like for those in the Foundation universe? What do people do all day? What are their jobs? Where would I fit in this world?

In Foundation, life, space and the world aren’t hard, aren’t perilous. We have no sense of the everyday struggle of people. The apparent threat – a civilisation ending prediction and a corrupt emperor – seem distant and detached when all the everyday problems of life are invisible or apparently techno-wizarded away.

Around the same time Foundation was released, fans were preparing for the very final series of The Expanse (2015-21). The Expanse, set in a relatively near-future in which humans are making tentative steps into the Solar System, had been quietly bubbling away since 2015, released without much fanfare on Netflix but quickly becoming a critical and fan success. So much so that when Netflix dropped it after season 3, fan outcry caused it to be rapidly picked up by Amazon Prime for the remaining 4 seasons with an expanded budget.

The first episode of The Expanse begins with a discussion of the inequities created by private asteroid mining companies being unwilling to properly compensate their employees because of jurisdictional issues. And from there it gets richer: This and other inequities have led to a revolutionary underbelly in the blossoming culture of ‘belters’ – those who have been born on the low-gravity asteroids mined for water, the most valuable resource to the ‘inners’ – Earthers and Martians. The Martians themselves form a highly secretive, militaristic separatist state, driven by the common vision of terraforming Mars while ‘Earthers’ are lazily taking government handouts on their flooded, overpopulated home planet.

Where Foundation is a world building exercised mapped by characters, The Expanse is a character-driven plot through which a world is built. A world full of the mundane perils of everyday life; the politics, the bickering, the broken-ness of systems, the general good-naturedness of people.

And this is before we get to the physics. The Expanse has been remarked upon repeatedly for its scientifically accurate portrayal of space. Just search YouTube for a plethora of videos from physicists and mathematicians on the accuracy of the show. Paradoxically, this can make it alienating for some viewers

THE AUTHOR

Tobias Revell is a digital artist and designer from London, he is Design Futures Lead at Arup Foresight, co-founder of design research consultancy Strange Telemetry and approximately 47.6% of research and curatorial project Haunted Machines. He lectures and exhibits internationally on design, technology, imagination and speculation. because in space, with no ground and a series of rotating, moving figures, it’s very hard for the eye to keep track of what’s actually going on and everyone’s relative positions. George Lucas foresaw this for Star Wars which is why the X-Wings and TIE Fighters fly like jet planes and there’s always a planet or mothership to ground everything.

Beyond the physical accuracy of the representation of speed, inertia and what it does to the human body, space is also slow and hard. Science-fiction in space has an inherent narrative problem; things are very far apart. This is usually solved with faster-thanlight travel or cryosleep to move the characters forward, but The Expanse makes use of this; several episodes rely on ships racing towards a destination or each other as a plot device, stretching it out over 45 minutes as the speed pushes the human bodies into the limits of survivability. Then they have to slow down. There are whole episodes about slowing down. One particularly memorable episode involves a character… exploding forwards.

The Expanse is full of peril. Not the Ridley Scott style of consistent dread and horror, just the everyday mundane peril of human life: The politics that may turn against you, the machinery that you rely on that may fail. Of course, the plot is driven by particular horrors but the everyday life of everyone in The Expanse universe is fleshed out with struggle. This is what makes it real and gripping, something futurists and foresight practitioners would do well to keep in mind; the everyday mundanity of peril that we all go through is unchanged by new, just-as-broken technology and just-as-fractious interplanetary civilisation; things are hard and annoying.

In one episode, there’s a moment where one of the spacefaring belters opens his visor in space for a few seconds to remove something that has got lodged in his helmet. This simple, prosaic moment perfectly sums up why The Expanse works so well. As an audience we are brought up against the sci-fi trope that exposure to space should kill us, but various experts responding to online questions have pointed out that this moment is probably exactly how it would go. The character pulls out the debris in his helmet, closes it, sighs and goes about his business. Space is hard, perilous and annoying, just like anything else.