Essays about history, stories, art, technology, living memory, science, material culture, architecture, gardens, molecular structures!
Also, news about Rhode Island and New England history, reviews of books, lectures and more!
On Monday October 28, 2019, renowned double bass player Ron Carter performed at a bass clinic Berklee Music School in Boston, where he "regaled a packed recital hall with stories about playing with Miles Davis and tips about his signature bass style."
Ron Carter (right) performs with Berklee faculty Steve Bailey (middle, electric bass) and Ron Savage (left, drums) (image by Dave Green)
"With 2,235 recordings to his name as a bassist (he set the world record in 2016 with 2,221), it’s no surprise that Ron Carter drops so many legendary names into his conversations that you need a shovel to scoop them up. During a recent guest lecture on campus, moderated by Steve Bailey, chair of the Bass Department, Carter would reference “Miles, Herbie, Wayne, and Tony” as if he was describing friends he met at a bar, and not his bandmates in Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet. The group, which Carter was a part of from 1963 to1968, helped teach the bassist one of the most important lessons of his career: trust. “We understood that this music would have a life if we were responsible for it, if we trusted each [other’s choices],” he said."
"Carter went deep into his own process and technique, which vacillated between the technical (“What’s it going to take to make this D-flat on the downbeat of [an F7 chord in a blues] work?”) to the quasi-mystical: “We were four scientists with a head chemist,” he said of the Second Great Quintet. “Our job was to recognize the chemicals [Davis] laid out for us, and manipulate them so there’d be a different kind of explosion every night.”
"Much of the talk centered on Carter’s ability to play seemingly “wrong” notes at the top of a tune—that aforementioned D-flat-over-F7 choice, instead of playing the traditional root note of F—but with a laser-precise view of what notes he’ll then need to play throughout the song to bring the band into harmonic alignment. “I don’t play root [notes] anymore,” he said early on, drawing laughs from the audience, before going on to make a broader point about the important role the bassist plays in creating a shared “language” for a song, saying, “Why would I put an exclamation point before the first word? The last root I played was…1978. It was the right one, too.”
In this video from June 3, 2022, Carter explains bass drops, fall offs, pull-offs and glissandos and how he uses them to make interesting or unusual connections between notes.
I began listening to Miles Davis (and hence, Ron Carter) as a freshman in college while I was taking a jazz appreciation course. At the time, I was very impressed by Miles' late 1960's and early '70s electric jazz fusion music. I had been listening to prog rock all through high school and this phase of Davis's reinvention of himself fed right into my tastes at the time.
But I have to be in the right mood for that stuff now. Mostly I listen to Miles' acoustic recordings these days. I enjoy his forays in bebop and hardbop in the 1940s and 1950s, and his modal phase -- which was just the one album, Kind Of Blue -- but what a phenomenal one album! But in particular I love his postbop recordings with the "Second Great Quintet," which was Miles Davis band from 1964 to 1968.
This lineup was composed of Miles Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock, piano, Tony Williams on drums and Ron Carter on bass. According to Richard Cook's It's About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record,
"The performance style of the Second Great Quintet was often referred to by Davis as "time, no changes", incorporating elements of free jazz without completely surrendering to the approach. This allowed the five musicians to simultaneously contribute to the group as equals at times, rather than to always follow the established pattern of having the group leader and then the backing musicians perform unrelated solos" (Cook, 168).
Miles Davis Second Great Quintet recorded six studio albums E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro, and the live set The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965. Below is an example of their style, the first track from 1967's Sorcerer, "Prince of Darkness"
Numerous other live performances were recorded or filmed, such as this one recorded on Halloween, 1967 at the Konserthuset in Stockholm, Sweden.
“Their solos were fresh and original, and their individual styles fused with a spontaneous fluency that was simply astonishing, The quintet’s method came to be dubbed ‘time, no changes’ because of their emphasis on strong rhythmic grooves without the dictatorial patterns of song-form chords. At times they veered close to free-improvisation, but the pieces were as thrilling and hypnotically sensuous as anything the band’s open-minded leader had recorded before.”
I am inclined to agree with John Fordham. Whether I am listening to the Second Great Quintet's studio work or anything they recorded live, I am constantly astonished by what they achieve. I also find the recordings by the other members of the Second Quartet, as leaders of their own projects from the same time period, to be of a similar high quality. Wayne Shorter's JuJu, Speak No Evil, The Soothsayer, Et Cetera, The All Seeing Eye, Adam's Apple, and Schizophrenia (all recorded between 1964 and 1968) and Herbie Hancock's Empyrean Isles, Maiden Voyage, and Speak Like a Child (recorded during the same 4-year timespan) are all excellent explorations free jazz/postbop, and most of them include Ron Carter on bass.
I never saw Miles Davis live. I was too young to have seen him before his mid-1970s hiatus, and I have to admit I was not a fan of his 1980s work when he came out of retirement (it's still not high on my list). So I didn't take advantage of several opportunities to have seen Miles Davis play in Newport, Boston or at other area appearances before his untimely death in 1991. But I have seen Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, both separately and together at the Newport Jazz Festival over the years, and I saw Ron Carter play at Waterplace Park in Providence almost 20 years ago.
Here is Ron Carter from around the time that I saw him at Waterplace Park. They're playing "All Blues," a song from Miles Davis Kind Of Blue, which starts at 50:34.
And here is Ron Carter playing in May 2022 for the NPR Tiny Desk Concert series, with Donald Vega on piano and Russell Malone on guitar. I especially like his "Blues for Tiny Desk" (3:34).
The Ron Carter Quartet is playing Sunday July 31, 2022 at Newport Jazz. When I was deciding which day to go this year, that Ron Carter is playing Sunday featured greatly in my decision to go then.
The current lineup for the Ron Carter Quartet is Renee Rosnes on piano, Payton Crossley on drums, Jimmy Greene on saxophone and of course, Ron Carter on bass, which is the line-up in the "Foursight" video below.
I leave you now with this recording Ron Carter made with Gil Scott-Heron in 1971, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Enjoy!
The cultural references in Gil Scott-Heron's poem can be read here.
Last night I gave my first public history lecture since November of 2020. I gave my presentation on Rhode Island democracy for the Western Rhode Island Civic Historical Society, in the Tavern Room at the Paine House Museum.
In a way it is also a history of political parties in Rhode Island, as well as a history of the General Assembly, and a history of the struggle to maintain (or upset) the status quo. I give a modified version of this presentation to the students on the RI Model Legislature leadership team. It is important students have an understanding about the history of the institution they are imitating.
Setting up the projector in the Paine House Tavern
The other thing I got to do was test drive my Surface Pro tablet running a presentation. The fan in my old HP ProBook 450 G1 died over a year ago, and I am running an external fan that pulls the hot air out through the exhaust port to keep it from overheating and cooking itself. Every time I restart it, I have to bypass the warning screen reminding me that there is no operational fan in the device. It has been out of warranty for seven years; that laptop has totally earned the right to hang out in my office and not leave the house anymore.
I also had to buy a USB C to HDMI VGA Adapter to connect the tablet to the projector, but it worked flawlessly. The only technical bumps were a) my powerstrip decided to take a permanent dirt nap, so I had to borrow one from the museum, and b) the AA battery to the mouse, which I use to click through the slideshow took a nosedive about 15 minutes into my presentation. But I have some extras in my brief case because this happens all the time at work. It only took me half a minute to get that dead battery swapped out. So overall not many technical problems. And the tablet worked just fine.
It's 6:30... Time to get started!
Below are some of the highlights from last night's presentation of the history of Rhode Island's Colonial era, the American Revolution and Early American Republic period. These slides are all from the first half of the presentation. If you want to find our what happens next and how it all ends, have your local historical society book me to come in!
Enjoy!
Someone somewhere must have uttered a more delightfully arrogant boast of the power they wield over their constituents. But if so, I have yet to see it.
Note: the images used in this post are subject to copywrite and appear here for educational purposes only. Any commercial use of the information or images on this this blog post are strictly forbidden.
If you use any of the information from the slides, please abide by the following Creative Commons license:
Giving students an overarching theme to come back to over and over as the course progresses can lead to some interesting "aha!" moments, or at get students to think about the implication of certain events through a lens they might not have thought about otherwise. One professor teaching a pre-Civil War American History course spiced things up by asking us to identify the strains of "Union" and "Disunion" during the Antebellum. Turns out there was a lot more disunionism going on and from people and places I hadn't suspected. But having that bug in my ear from the beginning kept me on the lookout for the ideas while completing the readings for the class, and it made for some interesting class discussions.
In American history, another set of intertwining themes are that of Utopian Idealism and Machiavellian realism (or pragmatism). From the arrival of the Puritans and their dream of founding "A City Upon A Hill," the powerful enlightenment language of equality, liberty and freedom in the Declaration of Independence, communes from the Shakers to the hippies, Americans have sought to create a better society than the one they came from or grew up with. At the same time, Americans have always done whatever it took to gain land, expand westward, forge a hemispheric hegemony, and to become the most powerful nation in the world.
Spend a little prep time at the beginning of the year comparing short bios of Niccolò Machiavelli and Sir Thomas More, and going over the basic concepts of the two philosophies. Then throughout the year, have students discuss and identify these dichotomies in an exit question or warm-up, and just before the review session at the end of a unit. Some interesting insights into what students see as the motivating forces in a given time period.
Big History, according to Khan Academy, is "a unified account of the entire history of the Universe that uses evidence and ideas from many disciplines to create a broad context for understanding humanity; a modern scientific origin story." It covers history from the Big Bang through to the present in an interdisciplinary way, using the summary findings from biology, cosmology, astronomy, geology, paleontology, and anthropology to show what happened before homo sapiens became the dominant species on the Earth. It is NOT an account of the past in teleological terms, with humanity as the the raison d'être for evolution, the Universe, and existence itself. Rather it maintains that viewed purely scientifically, humanity's significant yet absolutely miniscule context is a teeny-tiny speck compared to the incomprehensible time span of the Universe.
One of my all-time favorite animals from the paleontological past (edged out only slightly by the dinosaurs), are trilobites. If I ever teach a class in Big History, trilobites will get an entire lesson, at least.
Trilobites are an extinct marine arthropod, whose name comes from the Greek tri- "three" + lobos "lobe" -- so called because their body is divided into three lobes:
Trilobites are one of the earliest arthropods, appearing fully formed in the fossil record in the Early Cambrian period, 521 million years ago. Analysis suggests a long and cryptic development for trilobites before the breakup of the supercontinent Pannotia, between 600 and 550 million years ago, and possibly as far back as 700 million years ago.
They crawled along the bottom of the sea, but also swam through the water and when under attack they could scrunch themselves up into a tiny ball, protecting their vulnerable underside with their hard carapace (see animation above). They were one of the earliest animals to evolve sight, and their vision was more than a simple detection of light and dark. They appear to be the first creatures to evolve an apposition compound eye -- each lens acts independently to create a mosaic image of what a creature sees, like modern insects. Or rather, modern insects see just like trilobites, During their long existence they evolved into over 20,000 species ranging from under 1 centimeter long to over 1 foot in size (see Trilobites: Variations on a Theme, New York Times, March, 3, 2014),
The last trilobites disappeared in a mass extinction about 252 million years ago.
Excerpted from The Cartoon History of the Universe https://www.zipcomic.com/the-cartoon-history-of-the-universe-issue-1
Existing well over a quarter of a billion years... That is a pretty decent track record.
During that time trilobites survived a number of minor extinction events and two major mass extinctions (see chart below) that had eliminated almost all the other lifeforms that existed when they first appeared. The first one, the Ordovician Mass Extinction, was 450–440 million years ago at the Ordovician–Silurian transition when 85 percent of all species died out. The Second was the late Devonian Mass Extinction, 375–360 million years ago near the Devonian–Carboniferous transition, when 70 to 80 percent of all animal species went extinct.
The one that finally got them, the so-called "Great Dying" was the mass extinction from the transition of the Permian to the Triassic, killing off 90 to 96 percent of all species and bringing the Paleozoic Era, and the mighty trilobite, to a final end.
Attribution: Dragons flight (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
The video below ("Six Extinctions In Six Minutes - Shelf Life #12" by the Museum of Natural History) examines six mass extinction stories. The trilobite segment is from about 1 minute to 2:16.
Over the quarter of a billion years of trilobites in the fossil record, it becomes apparent that many trilobites appeared very similar to each other, but other species evolved many variations (see article above, "Trilobites: Variations on a Theme"). Today, both gradualism -- an evolutionary model that refers to the tiny variations in an organism or in society that happen over time to make a better fit for animals (or humans) in their environment -- stasis with punctuated equilibrium are considered essential processes to the evolution of life on earth. But that was not always the case.
"In the late 1960s, Niles Eldredge was a graduate student with a passion for trilobite eyes. He had been taught to expect slow and steady change between the specimens of these Devonian arthropods he collected for his dissertation.
Only his trilobites were doing one of two things: staying the same, or evolving in leaps.
Several years later, Eldredge, along with co-author Stephen Jay Gould, turned his observations into a theory known as “punctuated equilibria”: the idea that species stay relatively the same, or at equilibrium, throughout the fossil record save for rare bursts of evolutionary change.
Below is another video from the Museum of Natural History, "Niles Eldredge: Trilobites and Punctuated Equilibria." Enjoy!
[Note: the following outline is taken directly from a presentation I gave at a RIDE Professional Development Institute held at Rhode Island College in the spring of 2014]
Public Documents are in the public domain; no copyright restrictions!
Necessary Equipment
Digital camera
8-10 megapixels minimum resolution
AA batteries vs. rechargeable “battery pack”
Laptop computer to download and check images
USB cords to connect camera to laptop
Expect to be asked to sign-in, possibly check bag, coat, etc.
Good practice
Turn off cell phone!
Check quality of images immediately upon downloading to laptop
Re-photograph right then is a lot easier than driving back to repository to re-photograph a single key page/passage later
Photograph any relevant citation information on the spot
Organize images in named folders at same time as downloading to laptop
Backup data!
LOCKSS: Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe!
Rename photos by page number if you plan to be using the source as a constant reference
Sources of Public Documents
Town Halls / City Halls - in every RI town/city
Some towns and cities have a nearly complete set of records; others are missing some or most of their handwritten records -- fires, floods, hurricanes, misplacement, mold, and outright theft have left gaps in many municipal records before the age of modern printed or digital archival records.
Town Meeting Records
Town Council Records
Includes hearings of transients “warned out” of town
Probate Records and Wills
Land Evidence and Mortgages
Manumission of Slaves
Earmarks and Brands
Tax assessments and tax rates (town and state)
Voting lists
Audit books
Other Misc. Records: Overseer of the Poor (O.P.) reports, Justice of the Peace (J.P.) court records, town meeting warrants, etc.
Town Hall, South Kingstown RI SK has the most complete set of town records of any city or town in Rhode Island
Current RI State Archive, 33 Broad Street, Providence
NOTE: since this presentation, the RI State Archives have moved to a new location on Johnson & Wales University Providence Campus, 33 Broad St, Providence, RI. See RI Gov press release, 7/14/2020.
Rendering of future permanent state archive building, looking east down Smith Street. Question: is this Neobrutalism? Oh, be still my beating heart!
In January 2019, Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea sought to have a new RI Archive building constructed in the vicinity of the RI Statehouse on Smith Street. Rhode Island remains the only US state without a permanent state archive, and the current location is under lease for ten years while the state decides where to build a permanent location for the archive. [1]
Historical Sources at RISA (Rhode Island State Archive)
Rhode Island Laws (1705 manuscript; printed copies from 1719 on)
Microfilm (can photograph the screen or have pages printed fairly cheaply)
Records of the Colony of Rhode Island (manuscripts, some indexed)
Petitions Granted by General Assembly (17th to mid 19th century; some indexed)
Petitions Denied by General Assembly (finding aid currently being developed)
Manuscripts of all the above (when microfilm might be difficult to read)
Many other records too numerous to list here
Rhode Island State Library
Second Floor of RI Statehouse, Smith St., Providence
Awe-inspiring, beautiful room
Printed copies of Acts and Resolves of Rhode Island General Assembly and Schedules from 1747 to 1900
Very dense source of information
Too many topics to list here
Printed copies of Rhode Island Laws from 1767 to present
RI Statehouse, 82 Smith St, Providence, RI Below: Legislative Library, located on the second floor of the Statehouse
Rhode Island Law Library
250 Benefit Street, Providence, Rhode Island
Top floor of Licht Judicial Complex, Supreme/Superior Court
Metal detectors (it is in a courthouse)
Acts, Resolves and Reports of Rhode Island General Assembly
Rare legal texts related to RI history
Licht Judicial Complex, 250 Benefit St, Providence, RI 02903 Below, RI State Law Library top floor of Licht Complex
RI Supreme Court Judicial Archives
5 Hill Street, Pawtucket, Rhode Island
Repository for central repository for the State's semi-active, inactive, and archival court records.
Archival court records from 1671 to 1900 of civil, criminal, and divorce proceedings all RI county courts
No Justice of the Peace records (see town hall / local historical societies)
Many Kings/Washington County records too badly damaged to allow public access
Naturalization Records 1793-1974
Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission (RIHPHC)
Located in the Old Statehouse, 150 Benefit St, Providence, RI
State Survey Publications
Survey of every RI town, plus many villages and special topics (e.g., historic bridges, Native American archaeology, etc) – 60 books in total
.pdf files of each available on RIHPHC website
Some are little dated (survey began in 1967, long before 911 addresses were implemented)
Surveys for some towns are more thorough than others
Other Sources of Public Documents
University libraries special collections
archive.org (Internet Archive)
.pdfs of many RI documents; you may not even need to leave your house!
Acts and Resolves of the General Assembly of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations 1747-1800 available online Hugh & Hazel Darling Law Library, UCLA [these resources are unfortunately no longer available to non-students]
Local Historical Societies and Community Libraries
Rhode Island, Newport Historical largest collections
Many other communities have a historical society
Local libraries may house manuscripts and other historical documents in a special collection
Many historical societies / libraries have restrictions and fees in place regarding digital photography
Check policies beforehand
Often an under-utilized source of primary documentation!
_______________________________________________
[1] Beth Comery, "New Site For State Archives." Providence Daily Dose, January 3, 2020. https://providencedailydose.com/2021/01/03/new-site-for-state-archives/
The Expanseis a science fiction series of novels written by James S. A. Corey, the pen name for a collaboration between authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. The Expanse story consists of nine main novels and eight shorter works (two prequel short stories, one prequel novella, one interquel short story, and four interquel novellas). The final novella is set after the main book series.
From 2015 to 2018 the Syfy network aired three seasons of adaptations of the The Expansebooks, that roughly aligned with the first three books -- Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War and novellas and short stories through Abaddon's Gate and The Vital Abyss. It is set several hundred years in the future, after humans from Earth have colonized Mars, the asteroid belt and several moons of the outer planets.
The crew of the Rocinante (left to right): Amos Burton, James Holden, Naomi Nagata and Alex Kamal
It generally follows the adventures of the crew of a stolen Martian warship, the Rocinante, as humans deal with the discovery of a bizarre alien technology dubbed "the protomolecule," created two billion years ago by an alien civilization that has mysteriously vanished.
The protomolecule building...something...out of people on the asteroid Eros
Syfy cancelled The Expanse after three seasons, but it was picked up by Amazon, which aired three more seasons aligned with the events in the next three books and short stories: Cibola Burn is covered by season 4, Nemesis Games is essentially Season 5 and Babylon's Ashes and Strange Dogs Season 6.
These three books and the corresponding three seasons produced by Amazon follow the crew of the Rocinante after the protomolecule opened of a "Ring Gate" beyond the orbit of Uranus. This is a wormhole that connects our Solar System with over 1300 systems with inhabitable planets, and the technology left behind by the mysterious "Ring Builders." Meanwhile an interplanetary war breaks out over who will control the access to this new frontier.
Passing through the Ring Gate
The last three books -- Persepolis Rising, Tiamat's Wrath and Leviathan Falls make a leap into the future, picking up the story roughly thirty year after the war that ended Babylon's Ashes, with the reemergence of a renegade Martian faction that had escaped to an alien system with the only remaining protomolecule sample. This thirty-year shift between Books Six and Seven is a natural break in the action, and it is why the Amazon series stopped at Book Six.
The Martian corvette Rocinante
Based on personal experience, I highly recommend both watching the television series AND reading the books.
My first memory of science fiction is when I was about 4-years old and I watched the original airing of Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine." I was never the same after that. By the mid-70s I was a full blown Trekkie. I read and re-read every single one of the James Blish book adaptations of Star Trek: TOS, and the Alan Dean Foster adaptations of The Animated Series. At recess we played "Star Trek landing party" and launched polystyrene models of Klingon battle cruisers and the USS Enterprise out the third-story window of my friend's apartment. In 1975 it was Space:1999. Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Moonbase Alpha, a lunar nuclear holocaust on September 13, 1999 and models of Eagles and Hawks flying out the same friend's third-story window.
Then in 1977 -- the TV commercials for Star Wars. When they would come on, which wasn't that often, time seemed like it both slowed down and sped up. The movie looked like it was shot in real life compared with the cheesy special effects we were used to.
Near as I could figure, it was a world of Wookies and flying cities under attack shooting lasers.
My Uncle Bruce took me to see it that summer when it came out to wide release -- then I saw it again, and again, five or six more times that summer. Star Wars played at the Westerly Twin Cinema for over a year, only charging a buck a showing. One of my friends saw it over 100 times. Then I saw the first Alien movie the weekend it opened in theaters in 1979... By now I was reading Tolkien, Asimov, Frank Herbert and Harlan Ellison, Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land...and short stories like H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out Of Space and Alan Edward Nourse'sBrightside Crossing.
So, yeah. By the time I was in high school I had watched and read a lot of really good science fiction. And even more that was not very good at all. I am not kidding when I say The Expanse is one of the best sci-fi series ever written, and ever adapted to the screen.
The story originally began in the 2000s as a failed MMORPG video game that morphed into a tabletop roleplaying game before taking the characters from the roleplaying game and using them as the basis of the crew of the Rocinante. The DM for the tabletop game, Ty Franck, and the role-player who developed the character of Detective Miller, Daniel Abraham, took on the pen name James S.A. Corey and started writing the first novel, Leviathan Wakes. The story, based on the characters and plot emerging from the roleplaying game, also took inspiration from Alien, Dune, Babylon 5, Frederick Pohl's HeeChee trilogy, Larry Niven, Alfred Bester... The first two books (I am paraphrasing here based on some interviewsI watched on YouTube after Season Six concluded) are really a noir detective space opera with intense body horror that evolves into apolitical spy thriller. Books Three is ahaunted house story and Four a frontier western. With death slugs. Books Five and Six are a coming-of-age story set in a disaster movie, and the last three novels are an epic fantasy trilogy ala The Tombs of Atuan. But since it is really well-written science fiction, the genre-hopping is only a means to an end. The overarching story -- human beings trying (and mostly failing) to use a nearly incomprehensible alien technology for human ends, and the intent of the Ring Builders, which was to wait millions and even billions of years for another race to come along so they could -- wait, no spoilers! -- all seen through the crew of the Rocinante. It is epic in scope with characters that develop a lived-in intimacy and a realistic sense of family over the decades and centuries that the story takes place
I started with watching the television series when it was on Syfy and then the final three seasons on Amazon. Originally I only bought the last three books to find out what happened after the end of the war between "the inners" and "the belters" at the end of Season Six. But the last three books were so rich an experience I decided to go back to the beginning. I bought and read Books One through Six even though I had already watched the television series and knew in broad strokes what was going to happen. The books are different enough from the television series to make it a worthwhile endeavor. The story in the books is NOT a word-for-word script for the television series. Some TV characters are amalgamations of several book characters, and other book characters never make it into the television series. And just because a character is alive in the books doesn't mean they will survive in the television series, and vice versa. But it is the internal dialogues of the main characters, told in first person perspectives in the books, that flesh out the character, their through processes and motivations far more realistically than how the plot was occasionally pushed forward in the television series in the interest of time, to the detriment of character motivation and story-telling.
What makes James Holden, Josephus Miller (both incarnations), Amos Burton, and Chrisjen Avasarala tick is more understandable while reading the books.
I rarely take time away from reading history associated with whatever I am currently teaching or researching. Years ago I read a LOT of sci-fi and fantasy for fun -- some was good, some was great but most was meh. I just don't have time for fiction that is not absolutely 100% worth the time invested.
These books are worthy of all the time they take. And they are relatively quick reads too. I highly recommend them, to one and all.
Also, watch the television series!
Publication order is the best order to read the series. Below is an in-universe, chronological list of all works, with the main series of novels in bold:
Drive: An Expanse Short Story (Nov 27, 2012)
The Churn: An Expanse Novella (April 29, 2014)
The Butcher of Anderson Station: An Expanse Short Story (Oct 17, 2011)
The Expanse #1: Leviathan Wakes (June 2, 2011)
The Last Flight of the Cassandra: A Story of The Expanse - (bonus short story in The Expanse Roleplaying Game; May 14, 2019)
The Expanse #2: Caliban's War (June 26, 2012)
Gods of Risk: An Expanse Novella (Sept 15, 2012)
The Expanse #3: Abaddon's Gate (June 4, 2013)
The Vital Abyss: An Expanse Novella (Oct 15, 2015)
The Expanse #4: Cibola Burn (June 5, 2014)
The Expanse #5: Nemesis Games (June 2, 2015)
The Expanse #6: Babylon's Ashes (Dec 6, 2016)
Strange Dogs: An Expanse Novella (July 18, 2017)
The Expanse #7: Persepolis Rising (Dec 5, 2017)
Auberon: An Expanse Novella (Nov 12, 2019)
The Expanse #8: Tiamat's Wrath (Mar 26, 2019)
The Expanse #9: Leviathan Falls (Nov 30, 2021)
The Sins of our Fathers: An Expanse Novella (Mar 15, 2022)
The Expanse #10: Memory's Legion (March 15, 2022) - Compendium of most novellas and short stories
Digital Comic Miniseries (in conjunction with The Expanse television series)
The Expanse Origins is a digital comic miniseries and soft-cover graphic novel that serves as a prequel to The Expanse television series, reveals the untold origins of the four crew members of The Rocinante as well as Detective Josephus Miller. It was released between February and July 2017 and compiled into a single print volume in February 2018.
An interquel 4-issue miniseries, set between Season 4 and Season 5 of the TV series and just called The Expanse, was released between December 2020 and March, 2021 and compiled into a single print volume in August 2021.
Finally, if anyone decides to watch the television series after reading this blog post, I also recommend watching The Expanse episode recaps by Peter Peppers on YouTube. He has produced over 60 Expanse videos, and does fantastic breakdowns, reviews, and explainers. He's read the books and uses his knowledge from them to clarify anything confusing that happened in the television episodes, but without giving away spoilers what's coming next. Good stuff!
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