Fractures along orbital fault lines
How The Expanse depicts what happens when oppression leads to violence
I've spent a good chunk of time this week watching the horrifying events in Israel unfold. War is always a terrible thing, and this particular assault feels noteworthy for the brutality and indiscriminate violence that's taken place there.
I'm not an expert on the region, so I'm not going to attempt to untangle the long, troubled history between Israel and Palestine. But I do have a background in military history, and I've been thinking and reading on some of the deeper history of the types of friction points that often leads to violence. Rebellions and uprisings are never spontaneous, even if a riot, battle, or attack seems like it. They're often preceded by a build up of tension, much like an earthquake occurs when too much pressure builds up along a fault line.
That seems to be the case here: the history between Israel and Palestine is rife with violence and oppression, and it's a relationship that has long felt like the pressure has slowly ratcheted up until one side feels that they have nothing left to lose. That's not a justification for the violence that we've seen – there's no excusing the targeting of civilians – but it might provide a bit of context for why this has happened. I'm horrified to imagine what the next days and weeks of the conflict will bring.
While watching, I've been thinking about how we turn to literature and art to try and understand and interpret the world around us, and I keep coming back to one particular story: James S.A. Corey's The Expanse series.
If you haven't read the books or watched the TV adaptation, it's a nine-book series set a couple of centuries in the future where we've colonized our solar system. There's three main factions: Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets Alliance (a coalition of inhabitants of the asteroid belt and moons of the larger gas giants.) The first installment of the series, Leviathan Wakes, introduces us to a solar system that's brimming with tension. Earth and Mars are at cold odds with one another. Earth has advantages in numbers and firepower, while Mars is a technological powerhouse with an advanced fleet. The OPA is at odds with Mars, which has been stripping the Belt of its resources, leaving the miners and inhabitants in a somewhat powerless and precarious place.
The OPA harbors a considerable amount of resentment and anger toward their planetary counterparts, and Corey features the organization as a government with some extremist tendencies, one that's struggling to ensure that the Belters aren't completely taken advantage of by those larger geopolitical powers in the solar system, even if they don't have the ability to completely stand up to them.
(Some spoilers ahead if you haven't read or watched the series)
As the series progresses, the solar system slowly descends into war: the discovery of a deadly alien biological substance called the protomolecule kicks off a conflict between the various factions, and as this conflict brews, several radical elements of the OPA plan a major strike against Earth. That comes to a head midway through the series in the fifth book, Nemesis Games. The OPA bombards Earth with some stealth-equipped asteroids, devastating the surface. (In my review of the book way back in 2015, I noted that it reminded me a bit like the ending of The Empire Strikes Back – a bleak moment in the story for the heroes.)
Years ago, someone pointed out that the geopolitical world that Corey assembled for the series has some parallels to the tensions between Israel and Palestine and that of Earth, Mars and the OPA. There's a powerful, technologically-advanced nation alongside a marginalized one that's been engaged in a high-stakes, low-level conflict. The Martian military spent decades hunting down OPA privateers, sometimes abusing their power to harass and oppress those not engaged in hostilities.
It's easy to rationalize the boarding of a ship or the occasional firefight as law enforcement or anti-piracy operations, but if there's anything that the history of counterinsurgency tells us, it's that these smaller events are critical to radicalizing fighters in a movement. State-directed violence and economic grievances can turn a bystander into someone willing to take up arms against the system that's wronged them. In the Expanse TV series, OPA Free Navy leader Marco Inaros outlined his rationale for his attack in a speech after the bombardment: "this attack was retribution for generations of atrocities committed by the inners against innocent Belters."
I remember asking both parts of James S.A. Corey (authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) about the comparison between Israel/Palestine and Inners/Belters, and they were non-committal (I can't seem to track down an interview with them with that particular question – it might not have been part of a formal interview, but a side conversation), noting that as authors, they're rarely drawing on or copying direct situations and transposing them into their fictional universe.
But authors often do draw from the real world for varying levels of inspiration, and while they might not have had the Middle East directly in mind as they designed The Expanse, I don't think I can entirely discount the parallels that we can see in the situations. It's a story of how imbalances in power can lead to oppression, and in this particular case, we see throughout the series various examples of how the citizens of the Belt are subjected to immense pressures, and how that drives some of them to engage in terrorism and open warfare.
This is a story that we've seen in plenty of other fictional universes over the years. Andor was a particularly good story that highlighted why the Empire's oppression and violence against its citizens helped lead to the formation of the Rebel Alliance, while Frank Herbert's Dune is an outstanding narrative that includes some relevant points about colonialism, oppression, and counterinsurgency when it comes to the relationship between the Fremen and House Harkonnen. A nother book that comes to mind is C.L. Clarke's 2021 novel The Unbroken, deals with a number of similar topics in a fantasy setting.
It's worth noting in this particular instance that these aren't one-to-one comparisons, and you can't simply substitute the situations in these stories for the events that we're seeing across the world. This conflict is incredibly complex, with a long history of violence, while stories – even complicated stories – are simulacra of a world that can't really capture the full picture.
But stories as narrative tools do help us understand elements of these stories: authors and creators can examine the motivations of peoples on both sides of a conflict, the decisions they make, and the actions they carry out. I've long enjoyed The Expanse for that reason: it's a series that really works to understand the tribalism that we see throughout human history, how it can prove to be a destructive force, and what steps we need to defuse it to work together for a better future.
Hopefully, this ongoing conflict in Israel will come to some sort of resolution before too many more civilians and bystanders are killed.