The Similes of The Expanse
I love The Expanse. I love the books, I love the TV show, and I especially love the tie-in novellas. I just picked up Memory’s Legion—the complete story collection—and I’ve been listening to the few stories I haven’t already heard. And today I realized that one of my favorite things about the writing of Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank (the duo behind the penname James S. A. Corey that The Expanse is credited to) are their great similes.
It hit me at the start of “Gods of Risk”, where a character’s voice is described as buzzing “like a radio on just the wrong frequency.” Immediately, I thought of the famous first line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Gibson’s line is epic both because it’s a great image and because it shows the peril sci-fi authors face of getting the future wrong. Back in 1984, everyone knew what TV static looked like. Now, in 2022, digital has supplanted analog over the airwaves and TV static is gone.
I decided it’d be fun to transcribe the first paragraph of each of the eight stories in the collection to see what other images, metaphors, and similes Abraham and Frank used to start their tales. Then, for giggles, I ranked them. Now, I did this transcription by hand from Audible, so don’t get mad if spelling or punctuation are wrong, or if I didn’t get exactly the first paragraph. Here we go!
8. “The Vital Abyss”
They kept us in an enormous room, 90 meters by 60 with a ceiling 8 meters above us, a bit less than a football pitch, with observation windows along the top two meters all the way around from which our guards could look down us if they chose to. Old crash couches salvaged from God knew where lay scattered around the floor. Eventually I came to recognize a certain subtle smell, like alcohol and plastic, when the air scrubbers were replaced. And the humidity and temperature would sometimes vary, leaving runnels of condensate coming down the walls. Those were the nearest things we had to weather.
The phrase “runnels of condensate coming down the walls” is definitely a clear image, but since it’s not really a metaphor or a simile I’m putting this intro last.
7. “Drive”
Acceleration throws Solomon back into the captain’s chair, then presses his chest like a weight. His right hand lands on his belly. His left falls onto the upholstery beside his ear. His ankles press back against the leg rests. The shock is a blow. An assault. His brain is the product of millions of years of primate evolution, and it isn’t prepared for this. It decides that he’s being attacked. And then that he’s falling. And then that he’s had some kind of terrible dream. The yacht isn’t the product of evolution. Its alarms trigger in a strictly informational way. By the way, we’re accelerating at 4 gravities. 5. 6. 7. More than 7. In the exterior camera feed, Phobos darts past and then there is only the starfield, as seemingly unchanging as a still image.
There really isn’t a simile or metaphor here, either. There isn’t even a vivid image. But I did like the theme of evolutionary response—present in Solomon, lacking in the yacht—so I moved this up a slot.
6. “Auberon”
The old man leaned back in his chair, ran his tongue over his teeth, then lit a fresh cigar. His left arm was a titanium and carbon fiber prosthetic grafted deep into the bones of his shoulder, but his natural right arm was just as intimidating, scarred and pocked by decades of violence and abuse. His hair was a fluffy white fringe that cupped the back of his skull, and he wore a thin mustache like it was a joke he was in on.
Now we’re getting to the similes! From here on out, the introductory paragraphs all have at least one strong simile (or metaphor). I like this one a lot, but I still put it at the bottom of the list of the intros that actually have similes because I can’t concretely picture it.
5. “Gods of Risk”
“What kind of problem?” Hutch asked. Even though he was from the settlements near Mariner Valley, he didn’t have the relaxed drawling accent of that part of Mars. Hutch’s voice buzzed like a radio on just the wrong frequency.
Here’s the one I mentioned at the outset. It’s strong—and I like the connection to Neuromancer—but not as strong as some that follow.
4. The Sins of Our Fathers
The monsters came at night. First came their calls, distant and eerie. There wide, fluting voices echoed down the valley, complicated as symphony and mindless as a cricket swarm. The deepest of them sang in a range below human hearing, subsonic tremors that people in the township felt more than heard. Then the night scopes showed movement.
If you’ve ever tried to write a story—and especially if you’re read books or watched videos on how to do it right—you know that one of the hardest things about good writing is that every sentence has to accomplish multiple goals. This is especially true at the start of a story, where you have to hook the reader, introduce characters, reveal a problem, and much more all in (hopefully) a paragraph or two.
This metaphor is a great example of that kind of multi-tasking. Abraham and Frank need it to do at least triple-duty: be vivid enough to work on their own right, establish the right gritty/cerebral sci-fi tone, and usher in the story’s theme . I honestly can’t tell you how this one fares on the last element because “The Sins of Our Fathers” is the only story I haven’t finished yet, but the juxtaposition of a civilized, complicated symphony with natural, simplistic crickets makes this metaphor really work for me.
3. “Strange Dogs”
The day after the stick moons appeared, Cara killed a bird. That wasn’t exactly right. There had been stick moons, which her parents called platforms, as long as Cara could remember. At night they’d glowed with reflected sunlight like burnt orange bones, and in the daytime, they’d been lines of white bent behind the blue.
I can really, really picture this one. And it fits the story incredibly well. The stations are almost literally bones—the dead remnants of a long-extinct species—and the story itself deals with several important deaths, starting with the death of the bird mentioned in the first sentence. This is great writing. It might even be the best of the lot, based on its simplicity, but I am a sucker for complicated so I saved space for two more ambitious ones. Here they are, my top two.
2. “The Churn”
Burton was a small, thin, dark-skinned man. He wore immaculately tailored suits and kept the thick, black curls of his hair and the small beard on his chin neatly groomed. That he worked in criminal enterprises said more about the world than about his character. With more opportunities, a more prestigious education, and a few influential dormmates at upper university, he could have joined the ranks of transplanetary corporate executives, with all office at Luna and Mars, Ceres Station and Ganymede. Instead, a few neighborhoods at the drowned edges of Baltimore answered to him. An organization of a dozen lieutenants, a couple hundred street-level thugs and knee-breakers, a scattering of drug cooks, identity hackers, dirty cops, and arms dealers followed his dictates. And a class of perhaps a thousand professional victims: junkies, whores, vandals, unregistered children and others in possession of disposable lives looked up to him as he might look up at Luna, an icon of power and wealth glowing across an impassable void. A fact of nature.
It took a little while to get to this one. We had Burton’s physical description to get through first, which functions as a really great hook for fans of The Expanse because we know Amos Burton and this description is not Amos Burton. After that enticing mystery, the opening meanders a bit, but the comparison of a person of high status with the moon—both “glowing across an impassable void”—is incredibly evocative and well worth the wait.
1. “The Butcher of Anderson Station”
When Fred was a kid back on Earth, maybe 5 or 6 years old, he’d seen a weed growing in the darkness of his uncle’s cellar. The plant had been pale and thin, but twice as tall as the ones out in the side yard, deformed by reaching for the sunlight. The man behind the bar looked just like that. Too tall, too pale, too hungry for something he’d never had and never would. Belters were all like that.
One of my favorite things—in writing but also in music—is to take something that seems at first totally and completely unrelated and then find a way to make it organically fit into the whole. That’s why my favorite story structure when writing short fiction is kishōtenketsu. It’s a 4-act structure that works for stories, poetry, and even arguments/essays. You start with the introduction, then develop that further, then in part three you bring in a complication that seems to be totally unrelated to the first two parts. Then, at the end, you resolve the tension of this random imposition. Here’s a poetic example with one line per part:
Daughters of Itoya, in the Honmachi of Osaka.
The elder daughter is sixteen and the younger one is fourteen.
Throughout history, daimyōs killed the enemy with bows and arrows.
The daughters of Itoya kill with their eyes.
This opening image in “The Butcher of Anderson Station” obviously isn’t kishōtenketsu. But it still has that delicious combination of confusion and curiosity. What is a sci-fi story doing opening with a story about a weed in a cellar? As a reader or a writer, I absolutely love when something can seem totally random at first, but then be seamlessly woven back into the narrative after all.
And when you see how that weed is being used as a representative of Belters? It works. I mean, it really works: visually and metaphorically. It’s an absolutely killer opening.
I’m glad I took the time to transcribe these paragraphs and ruminate on why they worked so well for me. I’ve really emphasized hooks (immediate tension) and descriptiveness (especially across multiple senses) for the intros to my short stories. I’ve never thought of just using really killer similes as a way to draw people in. Never heard anyone recommend that. But it works like catnip on me. And since the older I get the more I want to write stories that I will be proud of (as opposed to trying to chase down what I think might be popular), I’m going to have to give this a try.