![]() It's a little different with Ilus because we've got humans coming to an alien planet with a different biome than human genetics. There were things that were poisonous, that they didn't understand. All the biology that was there was stuff that they were not used to. Imagine the first Europeans coming to Australia. There are things that happen when you have interacting biomes. "Oh, things are fine." Well, biology is much more complicated than that. It appears to be Earth-like, because you can breathe the air. Amazon Prime VideoĪ: That's a really good way to describe it. James Holden (played by Steven Strait) suffers the physical consequences of acceleration in The Expanse. There's sort of an uncanny valley experience. Q: In season four we see an exoplanet, Ilus, that's rich in lithium-a rare mineral that's valuable in the future. "This could break the ship apart!" That was the tension of it. But they decelerate much harder than they should have. The only way a ship can change course is "flip and burn," which is to flip around and fire the rocket. This crappy old ship has to suddenly divert off of its course to go investigate a distress call. In the pilot, the series opener, the big action sequence was the ship making a turn. Personally, I'm quite tired of seeing spaceships fly around like fighter planes in the Pacific in World War II. You see realistic objects changing orientation with thrusters. You don't see control surfaces and aerodynamic flight, because they're all moving in a vacuum. You see conservation of momentum, conservation of angular momentum: all of the things that would actually occur in space. Q: What about the physics of your spaceships?Ī: They fly with realistic physics. In the very next episode, people on Earth are realizing that that has happened, like, 25 minutes ago. ![]() At the end of one episode, a bunch of missiles are heading off to basically hit Mars. When I got the script for the The Expanse, the pilot, I was, like, "Wow, this is a very different kind of a show." Because they embraced all of the things that most science fiction shows run away from: the fact that you don't have weight unless your ship is accelerating, the fact that communication in space is not instantaneous. Does that fire up the physicist in you?Ī: It does, and it's actually one of the things that attracted me to the project. Q: The Expanse tries to incorporate real-world science. Investigating, the idea of the logical path to do a criminal investigation, evaluating evidence: All of that sort of really did play to the training. ![]() I did a lot of science fiction in the early stage of my career, and then I did a lot of cop shows and crime shows. Naren Shankar, showrunner for The Expanse Amazon Prime Video Everybody sits down and reads it and then you take it apart. That is really the process of the writing, when you're writing a script. You write a paper, sit down with your colleagues, and then you pare it down. Q: What did your science education bring to your television work?Ī: One of the most valuable things I took away from school is peer review. They said, "Hey, come out, be a screenwriter." And I thought, great. I had a couple of friends out in Los Angeles that I had just done creative writing with when I was in school. The field rewards incredible specialization, and I saw myself becoming more and more of an expert over a smaller and smaller corner of the universe. And somewhere along the line I just kind of decided I didn't want to be an engineer anymore. Usually, people transfer out of the college of engineering! I stayed all the way through to get my Ph.D. In my second year, I transferred into the college of engineering. Q: How did you end up making sci-fi shows?Ī: I actually started at Cornell as an arts student. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Shankar chatted with Science about why he feels it's important to have a realistic sci-fi show, and how television work is like the scientific peer-review process. The veteran writer and producer for programs such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Farscape, and the police procedural CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, has a doctorate in applied physics and electrical engineering. Showrunner Naren Shankar is part of the reason the science checks out. On 13 December, Amazon Prime will air the fourth season of The Expanse, a hardboiled space drama renowned for its working-class characters and real-world space physics.
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