#protomolecule

[asleepies]

Kiss me hard one last time before the protomolocule rips us from each other arms and strips us down to our atoms

[corruptedmuse]

I finished watching/reading the expanse last month and it's just one of those things that's kept living in my head since.

[talesfrommedinastation]

“If it’s any comfort, being surrounded by people who hate each other and getting them to not kill each other has been the story of my life for the last…eh, fuck it, it’s the story of my life.” 

Jim Holden, 'Give Ear, O Earth: Part 1', To Guard Against Titans

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Calming down and setting up for the last two books. In this chapter:

Group of mercenaries, clones, and the Rocinante crew have to come to terms.

Echo is dying with the screeching Protomocule ghost of Fives running around.

"Dang, you guys have had some weird shit happen since leaving this dump!" - Phee Genoa

The Weeping Somnambulist is brought up by Naomi Nagata and she's still clearly having Big Feelings about it (and who wouldn't?).

Also finishing out his cameo is Ghoul, who has a nice chat with Captain Holden about life. Belongs to @cloned-eyes, check them out!

[youwontbelievethethingsiveread]

Cortazar is most definitely awful, but he's also entertaining (as long as you're not one of his victims). Everyone's favourite sociopathic professional vivisectionist ✌🏻

[wanderrealms]

Watching an analysis of Dead Space games. Somethings kind of remind me of The Expanse and the protomolecule (I'm half way into Abaddon's Gate the 3rd book in the series).

[doolallymagpie]

Hive Fleet Protogen test piece Genestealer’s done; Sergeant Roberta Draper of the Death Strike is assembled and her head is painted

Still can’t decide if I want to try the Louise Sugden power sword for her

[scifi-smashorpass]

protomolecule - the expanse (in human form, looks blue ish)

[axlesaxo]

Just finished reading Leviathans Wake and I gotta say, the protomolecule is literally the stuff of my nightmares. That first description where Miller saw Eros on the camera feed gave me chills, and then just the idea that it is sending out broadcasts and these broadcasts are being turned into club music. Ugh something about it just makes me feel sick. Anyway, Miller's chapters towards the end were very good and very sad. Very good book, I picked up the sequel immediately after finishing.

[dreadbirate]

It’s early on, I’m on the second book and might not have the third for a while, but I’m not buying that the Protomolecule was an intentional weapon. It’s certainly the assumption that Protogen made, but Protogen were idiots on top of being completely amoral. Seems to me that Phoebe was sent to what we would have considered to be an uninhabited planet, and it doesn’t seem like more “spores” have been sent since. I think it���s just a colony ship ngl.

[talesfrommedinastation]

Something I'm cooking up for a sequel to Far Past the Ring is entities that are familiar with a concept like magic (or the Force in Star Wars) getting their hands on the Protomolecule to study it.

And shit proceeds to occur.....

One of my biggest complaints about The Expanse series is that the "protomolecule" has zero limitations as a plot device. It's been shown that it's able to:

Spread and infect everyone that comes in contact with it, turning people into decaying piles of crystals

Turn people into unstoppable killing machines

Create propulsion systems that aren't limited by Newtonian physics with near-infinite ability to accelerate and decelerate

Create high technology spacecraft

Create stargates across the universe

Create life from nothing

Help life evolve into viable forms without turning into static crystals

Survive insane high impacts

Terraform entire planets

Create maximum-speed fields (that nevertheless cause ships and people to die because of shock propagation)

Create telepathic projections in people's brains from any distance

And this is just stuff from the TV show - the book goes on another multiple season-equivalents and has further magical effects.

This makes for really unsatisfying science fiction when the major plot device can cause or solve basically any problem presented by the series. Including just completely resolving the Mars/Earth conflict plot by creating unlimited alien planets that people can settle on instead of Mars, despite that travel being far more costly in terms of fuel and time. (Mars is between 1/3 - 2.5 AU from Earth, and the Stargate is about 22 AU). To the point where people whose families have invested generations in Mars's development are just...leaving for alien planets that were created by "Magic Kill Everything Technology".

The show was at its best when it was exploring interplanetary politics, terrorism, character growth and fall, etc. It was always at its worst when it was all about Stuff The Protomolecule Was Doing. (At its middle, it's about Interplanetary Politics, But About the Protomolecule). At its worst, it was full of plots where the plot trigger and plot result are both about something the protomolecule does that is beyond human understanding.

[bereft-of-frogs]

yo do I just have annoying fan brain right now or are Murderbot and ART also watching The Expanse in chapter 3 of System Collapse??

(Paraphrased due to audiobook, don’t have the text in front of me) ‘historical drama about humans leaving their solar system for the first time’ ‘blend of realism and fun stuff like space battles’ ‘throwing asteroids at planets’

[lonepower]

bitches will see a human forced to interact with an incomprehensible asshole entity wearing an ill-fitting veneer of personhood and ask "is anyone gonna ship that" and not wait for an answer i'm bitches

[talesfrommedinastation]

Latest chapter of 'Into the Techiverse!' is up!

Like a vodka-Redbull, or watching the season 2 finale of 'The Bad Batch' followed by the finale of 'The Mandalorian', a downer quickly mixed and/or chased with an upper is going to make one feel discombobulated. But it's needed.

This latest chapter of 'Into the Techiverse' promises to be delightful and fandom blind, and Lord help me I needed to write that after the last, brutal chapter of Far Past the Ring. It's a clutch of Techs finally hanging out and doing what Tech would do if he met a bunch of Techs.

That was a weird sentence to type out.

The fourth wall's broken in this, FWIW.

The universes in which the Techs come from is from @techs-stitches @wrenkenstein @moosethren . Although she's part of the project, @ilikemymendarkandfictional 's Tech is, unfortunately, gone, which is a massive plot point.

[youwontbelievethethingsiveread]

There's that epilogue in Nemesis Games where the Martian ship gets eaten by the evil aliens, but the first event before alien dinner time is Sauveterre taking a bracelet from a subordinate and explaining to her in great detail why wearing a bracelet with your uniform leads to anarchy, and so he's actually being kind by taking her mother's bracelet and throwing it in the trash instead of ordering her execution then and there. I don't have the book at hand but he goes on about how he can see her realise (that you're a lunatic, sir, though probably not what you meant), and it's honestly a bit of a relief that he gets eaten, even if the evil aliens are scary.

Flash forward thirty years and a book to Persepolis Rising where in the prologue Cortazar goes to check his "milking herd" for protomolecule samples (people who have been sacrificed, those are people, Cortazar), and has a casual chat with a coworker about how one of their guards is now being slowly killed by the protomolecule because maybe he slept on the job or something (they don't know what he did, and they don't care). Drives home that poor Babbage likely would have been thrown in the protomolecule pit for a bracelet, had they already arrived at Laconia. These people don't mess around and they're also really really not the sort of people you'd want heading a galaxy spanning empire, holy moly

[doolallymagpie]

people on Reddit thinking Naomi's whiny and annoying and untrustworthy 🤝 people on Tumblr thinking Holden is driven by macho manpain and has no attributes

neither has actually watched The Expanse

[mikimeiko]

Books I read in 2024

Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey (2011)