Hey, Where's Our Next "Expanse"?

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science and ideas and the importance of remembering when we saved the world.

This week, I’ve been captivated by this photo of a can of coconut milk:

As you can see, it’s a really lousy piece of Photoshop work.

Except - wait, what?

These are, as far as I can tell, unaltered photos of a very real, very confusing phenomenon that happens twice a year.

What’s happening here is the sun is briefly but perfectly directly overhead, at a location on the Earth’s surface called a subsolar point. In this moment, any perfectly upright object set snugly to the ground has its only shadow hidden underneath it - and the result is our minds don’t quite know what they’re seeing.

Here’s the opposite of this effect in action:

Until I saw these photos, and this fascinating thread by a molecular biologist from Texas, I hadn’t considered the role that shadows play in our sense of locating objects in space. It’s one of those subtle cues that we use to fit the world together in our heads…

…and when it disappears, as happens twice a year in Hawai’i at a time that’s been dubbed “Lāhainā Noon”, everyday things take on an uncanny look, like an open-world videogame where you’ve disabled shadows to keep the frame-rate playable. Thrillingly odd!

In other news, and following on from my recent piece on innovative leaps forward with solar power generation, here’s a startling quote from Sam Matey-Coste’s recent conversation with Abi Olvera:

It's potential economic tipping-points like this that I get the most excited about. When it becomes cheaper for everyone to choose the smartest, lowest-impact option, that's when stuff goes bananas.

(Of course, it’s also when the people who rely on existing, suddenly-more-expensive systems to keep raking in massive profits accelerate their efforts to get in the way. So it predictably goes.)

Anyway! On with today’s business.

I noticed it’s been a while since I talked about science fiction (I think the last time was with Antonia Malchik, here) - so this is a whopper of a newsletter that hopefully makes up for it.

I can’t quite believe it, but it’s been four and a half years since “Babylon’s Ashes,” the finale of season 6 of the TV version of The Expanse.

It’s probably horribly naïve of me, but I really thought this show would spark a revolution in small-screen science fiction: unashamedly adult without being tawdry; a massive ensemble cast that gives a strong sense of a living, breathing world the protagonists are improvising their way through; a complex story with minimal hand-holding, forcing you to pay great attention; and a very clear narrative map for the show to follow, guaranteeing that we could all look forward to an ending that’s been baked in from the beginning.

I’m not saying it wasn’t a rocky ride, with cancellation by SyFy, resurrection at Amazon Prime and a truncated final season - but it did get there, and the show-runners still haven’t given up on finding it a new home for the remaining three books in the series.

(Within the story itself, there’s a twenty-eight year gap between books 6 and 7, so if it takes another decade to find a new network, the returning cast would look somewhere near the right age, and we’d all benefit from a decade of advances in VFX - and considering the scale of events in books 7-9, that might just about make the whole thing filmable without bankrupting everyone involved.)

But now it's been over four years. Where's its spiritual successor?

There’s the recent AppleTV+ adaptation of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, titled Murderbot. I love the books so much, with their socially awkward protagonist who wants to be left alone so he can binge-watch TV (relatable), and I was so nervous they’d stuff it up - but no, I found it pitch-perfect:

Meanwhile, Denis Villeneuve has proven it’s possible to adapt one of science fiction’s weightiest epics and storm the box office with it. He’s now lined up for another one: after a film about Cleopatra for Sony, he’s down to adapt Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama for Alcon Entertainment (and, at some point, the next James Bond film - what a busy chap).

So maybe book-to-screen science fiction is indeed having a moment, and I’m just being impatient. But I’ve been reading sci-fi for the last 40 years, at the rate of at least a few dozen books a year, and of course I have a wish-list that I wish I was crossing off a lot quicker. We’ll get to some of that shortly.

First, though, here are some book adaptations that already are coming soon, even though the teenage nerd in me can’t quite believe it yet.