The Expanse Creators Tease Unadaptable New Sci-Fi Series Coming To TV Soon

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The creators of The Expanse are discussing the potential for a new television or film adaptation of their work.

Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck collaborated under the name James S.A. Corey to create the nine-book series The Expanse. This series was adapted into a six-season television show that originally aired on Syfy in 2015 before moving to and concluding on Prime Video in 2022.

The authors recently launched a new book series, The Captive’s War, and discussed the challenges of making another television show based on it in an interview with Polygon.

Naren Shankar, who ran the show for The Expanse, is also the showrunner for The Captive’s War. Author James S.A. Corey (Abraham) confessed that they unintentionally made the book incredibly difficult to adapt, which frustrated and confused Shankar.

The story focuses heavily on the characters’ inner lives, and it also features aliens that will need extensive visual effects. As the speaker put it, “We didn’t make it easy on ourselves.”

Honestly, as a fan, I loved that the creators didn’t pull any punches with ‘The Captive’s War’! Apparently, it really frustrated the showrunner because it was a tough book to adapt. It’s full of deep dives into what the characters are thinking and feeling, and the aliens are incredibly imaginative and complex. It wasn’t designed to be an easy adaptation, and they deliberately made it that way, which I think is awesome. They didn’t shy away from making it challenging!

Franck explained that adapting the story is a slow, step-by-step process, like building with many small blocks, and the team is currently only on the third layer. He emphasized that they have a long way to go before they can even begin thinking about visual effects – they’re still at the very early stage of deciding if they should even write a script yet.

Real change happens gradually, with many small steps building on each other. We’ve only completed a few of these steps so far. There’s still a lot of foundational work to be done before we can even start thinking about things like special effects – right now, we’re still at the stage of just figuring out the basic story.

The characters’ inner lives, like that of Dafyd Alkhor who is burdened by a hidden guilt stemming from past choices, are a key part of the story. What’s fascinating is that the writers, Abraham and Franck, understand these are aspects best left unshown to the audience.

The showrunners faced a similar challenge in the first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes, where the character Miller spends time wallowing in self-pity. According to Abraham, simply showing that on screen wouldn’t have been very engaging, so they used visual techniques to convey his emotions instead.

We’ve faced this challenge before. In ‘Leviathan Wakes,’ the character Miller spends a lot of time feeling down, drinking, and lost in thought. The way he was originally written wouldn’t have worked well on screen, so we had to find different ways to show his internal struggles visually. That’s where an actor like Thomas Jane comes in – he could capture the essence of the character using different skills and techniques, ultimately achieving the same emotional impact.

The first book in the Captive’s War series, The Mercy of Gods, was published in 2024. The sequel, The Faith of Beasts, followed in April 2026. The authors also wrote a short story called Livesuit.

In The Mercy of Gods, Dafyd and his team are captured by a group known as the Carryx. He must then fight for survival and find a way to protect humankind.

While The Expanse consisted of nine novels plus additional short stories, authors Abraham and Franck intend The Captive’s War to be a shorter series, consisting of just three books.

Adapting The Expanse was a huge undertaking, and the team deliberately chose to stop after a certain point. As Franck explained, facing the prospect of adapting nine books felt daunting. “By the fourth or fifth book, you start to think, ‘Wow, we still have four more to go!'”

Having just finished working on The Expanse – both the books and the show were a real marathon, honestly pretty brutal – my writing partner and I decided to approach The Captive’s War differently. We wanted something a little more focused, with a smaller scope than The Expanse, even though we still had a lot of mysteries to unravel and bring together. It was a conscious choice to keep things a bit more manageable after the scale of the previous project.

Franck explained they didn’t aim for a lengthy series this time around. He said that by the fourth or fifth book, the prospect of writing several more can feel overwhelming.

By the time we reached the fifth book, we were already in full production, which was incredibly draining. Sending Ty to film for 12 to 14 hours a day while still trying to finish the books on time was really tough. Because of that, we decided to write something less ambitious than The Expanse.

Abraham and Franck were executive producers on the TV show The Expanse, and now they’re taking on more responsibility with their new production company, Expanding Universe. Their first project as Expanding Universe will be The Captive’s War on Prime Video.

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2026-05-09 00:52