The Galactic Overlord Expanse

     Tam and I have started watching The Expanse together.  It's a second time through for me and I'm still enjoying it.  Oh, it's space-opera; travel times are laughably condensed, radio conversations don't have any speed-of-light lag, and so on; but it's good space-opera, engaging tales well-told within a larger story arc that unfolds slowly.

     There was something familiar about the general outline: the big threat, the cliffhanger endings, the matter-of-fact treatment of space travel and associated tech--

     In Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile The Rolling Stones -- one of his best, despite just about every part of it having been swept away by subsequent developments in the real world -- Roger Stone and, later, Hazel Stone finance the family's haring off into the far reaches of inhabited space by writing an ongoing science fiction drama (probably radio, possibly some form of TV).  Science and sociology howlers in the series-within-the-book come in for occasional criticism among the characters, as does the melodramatic nature of it, but the series is obviously popular among the public and sounds like great fun if you don't get too picky about plausibility.

     And that's The Expanse in a nutshell.  There's way too much unused volume in the cabins of those spaceships; they haven't got room for the amount of reaction mass they must use, and so on and on.  Nevertheless, it's great fun, and does the best job of building a lived-in future seen on television since Firefly.