![](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/NUP_174150_0623-800x534.jpg)
Enlarge / Detective Joe Miller and the nuke he has to babysit.
The clip is taken from the episode that airs on Wednesday evening on Syfy, so consider this a warning about mild spoilers.
Here at Ars we unapologetically love science fiction. Books, movies, comics—all of it. In fact, it needn’t even be very good to earn our affection—who among us doesn’t have a soft spot for Robot Jox or Dark Star? Of late, there has been a wave of fiction that has taken a closer look at what life would be like once humanity starts to colonize the Solar System and beyond: Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora for example, as well as the miniseries Ascension. But none of those has given us something that’s quite as well fleshed out as James SA Corey’s The Expanse.
While it feels lazy to compare the series to Game of Thrones, it’s understandable how that has happened. This sprawling, Solar System-wide series originally started life as the idea for an MMORPG somewhere around the turn of the century, before morphing into a series of novels (and novellas), and finally, a TV series on Syfy. Adapting a book to the screen can often be a fraught experience for the fan that is invested in the story. Unusually, however, Corey—or the two humans behind that nom de plume, Dan Abraham and Ty Franck—are deeply embedded in the show’s writers’ room.