this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Would you recommend reading the book first before going into the show?
I'm not the person you wrote to but I recommend reading the books and not watching the show at all.
That will only harm your enjoyment of the show, because they share so little.
it really depends, LOTR movies made significant changes but I still love it even if it’s not 100% like the books.
Then there’s World War Z where all they did was use the title and some loosely based details. Still enjoyable but not a huge fan.
Then there’s I Am Legend which I didn’t like at all as it didn’t match with the actual point of the story (the alternate ending wasn’t bad though but still left the bad taste in my mouth from the original ending).
Thinking of doing exactly that. Watch the show and then enjoy the books .
The Expanse is an interesting case of book-to-TV adaptation. The authors for the books were fairly involved with the TV series, and, in some ways, it's their retelling of the main story with some changes that streamlined things for the visual medium. The main things have to do with the consolidation of several characters (e.g., most prominently TV Drummer is an amalgam of three or four different people from the books), and the early introduction of some other ones (e.g., Avasarala and Draper) (though, on the flip side, because of the way actors contracts work, these characters were given make-work arcs in some seasons because they don't appear during the corresponding books). These changes generally made sense and were pretty well done.
Anyway, the books are excellent. The TV series is excellent.
Note that the last three books were not adapted for TV, though there was some set up that will eventually lead into those books. One logistical trick is that the last three take places some 30 years after the first six, so there's a matter of the actors' ages. But the TV series ended very well. You want more, but the main plot lines dominating the first six books were tied up.