The Expanse’s aliens were always just an extension of its politics

polygon.com:

[Ed. note:This article contains major spoilers for The Expanse books and the end of the TV show.]

The American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn first coined the phrase “paradigm shift” in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe the point at which scientists are confronted by a phenomenon that proves their previous understanding of how the universe worked was flawed. While Kuhn was describing transitions like the move from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics, the term became a useful way to talk about other major changes in the way humans saw the world, from the first images of Earth from space jumpstarting the environmentalist movement, to the way COVID-19 changed how people view remote work.

The best science fiction isn’t about predicting the future but commenting on the present, and The Expanseultimatelyreflected on all the ways humanity has dealt with recent paradigm shifts. Throughout the series’ six seasons spread across Syfy and Amazon, the origins, abilities, and motives of the show’s aliens remained fairly cryptic.

But Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who wrote the series of science fiction novels the show is based on under the pen name James S. A. Corey, seemed to mostly be interested in how humans handled the discovery of extraterrestrial technology. Those extraterrestrials were never really characters so much as an external pressure that pushed the show’s various characters and political factions to quickly adapt.

Plots involving the protomolecule, a sort of self-sustaining probe sent to Earth’s solar system by a long extinct alien civilization, often felt at odds with the very recognizably human stories that the writers of The Expanse were otherwise telling. Viewers