Hugo Award nominee 2012, Locus Award nominee 2012.
Welcome to the future.
Humanity has colonized the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond – but the stars are still out of our reach.
Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, The Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for – and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.
Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to The Scopuli and rebel sympathizer, Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.
Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations – and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.
"It's been too long since we've had a really kickass space opera. LEVIATHAN WAKES is interplanetary adventure the way it ought to be written, the kind of SF that made me fall in love with the genre way back when, seasoned with a dollop of horror and a dash of noir. Jimmy Corey writes with the energy of a brash newcomer and the polish of a seasoned pro. So where's the second book?" – George R. R. Martin
"An excellent space operatic debut in the grand tradition of Peter F. Hamilton." – Charles Stross
The series
Humanity has reached the stars—but it’s still haunted by its oldest problems.
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The Expanse begins not with a heroic mission or utopian dream, but with a missing girl and a mystery that pulls at the fragile threads of a solar system on the brink. Mars, Earth, and the scattered colonies of the Belt live in uneasy balance, each burdened by political tension, economic disparity, and centuries of mistrust. And then something ancient awakens.
What sets this science fiction epic apart isn’t just the scale—though it spans planets, factions, and eras—it’s the people caught in the chaos. A haunted ship’s captain with a stubborn moral compass. A foul-mouthed politician willing to burn worlds to save her own. A Belter detective chasing ghosts through dust and vacuum. Their stories intertwine not because fate demands it, but because the system they inhabit is collapsing—and they’re just awake enough to notice.
The world-building is dense and lived-in, with asteroid stations that feel rusted and claustrophobic, Martian warships that hum with quiet threat, and alien technologies that refuse to be understood. Yet amid the cosmic scope, the emotional core always stays human. The writing captures the intimacy of fear, loyalty, and hard choices, even when the stakes are planetary.
Adapted into a critically acclaimed television series, The Expanse has become a touchstone for modern space opera—not by echoing the past, but by carving its own orbit through the genre. It’s science fiction where the future looks eerily familiar, and the real alien threat might not be from beyond the stars, but from what we carry with us into them.
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