The Expanse authors James S. A. Corey explore alien war in new book The Faith of Beasts | Scientific American

April 10, 2026

7 min read

Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm

The Expanse authors James S. A. Corey dive into alien minds in The Faith of Beasts

Award winning duo James S. A. Corey show humanity’s struggle with staggering alien power in their latest installment of the Captive’s War series

By Sarah Lewin Frasier edited by Brianne Kane

Hachette Books/Scientific American Illustrations

Adapt or die: How do you grow and evolve to fit into an alien environment? How do you create change in the face of overwhelming power? And how do you tell your extraterrestrial overlords you need a pen and paper to do the research they’ve demanded?

James S. A. Corey, the nom de plume of the duo behind the Hugo Award–winning space saga The Expanse, explore these essential questions and more in The Captive’s War series—whose second novel, The Faith of Beasts, is out next week. Instead of The Expanse’s sprawling epic of humanity’s journey to the stars, The Captive’s War sees humans brought under the thumb of a ruthlessly controlling alien empire and struggling to resist, build lives and maybe even find a way to win.

Scientific American caught up with Corey—actually writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—to ponder frighteningly realistic extraterrestrial invasions, changing concepts of personhood, weird alien societies and the terror of tenure-track research.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

As Abraham puts it, “The faster-than-light drives in this series are probably not the ones that we’ve done the most rigorous work on, but the biology is fun.”

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

After the iconic Expanse series, did you two know you wanted to keep working together, or did it take some convincing?

ABRAHAM: I mean, I was up for it. Ty, do you have regrets?

FRANCK: I have many regrets [laughs]. I think that we were always talking about doing other stuff after The Expanse, and I had pitched Daniel an idea while we were still writing The Expanse that wound up becoming The Captive’s War.

ABRAHAM: The idea of an epic sci-fi retelling of the Book of Daniel, with the idea of following somebody into a vast and overwhelming empire and being instrumental in the empire falling. I always thought it was fun, so it was pretty easy to pick as the next gig.

In The Expanse, human society is front and center. Were you excited for a chance to invent so many alien societies instead?

ABRAHAM: It was a way to exercise some of my biology degree—which I’ve never used professionally otherwise.

FRANCK: The one thing that Daniel and I didn’t want to do is another series that felt like The Expanse. The Expanse was very human-centric, very near-future, and so [this was] a chance to do something that was very far-future and not human-centric. Humans are integral to the story, but they’re, in many ways, the least powerful; they have the least agency in the story.

ABRAHAM: There’s always a danger, when you’ve had something that did well, that you turn into your own cover band. You end up trying to recapture or rechew the same thing that did well last time. It’s a vice, something to avoid.

The Expanse spanned a lot of different tones and genres, but this series is a lot more compact and focused. What are the main beats you’re hoping to explore?

FRANCK: I know Daniel always was very interested in telling stories of resistance through just existing, [the idea] that staying alive sometimes is an act of rebellion.

ABRAHAM: One of the things that we were playing against was the alien invasion story where the humans punch their way out of problems, where, once again, violence is the way to redeem the day—or luck, like War of the Worlds, [where something like] a virus happens to take out the bad guys. When you look at stories of resistance, like in the Book of Daniel, so much of it is about much softer kinds of power. That was a fun place to go.

FRANCK: We all love these stories, but the version where enormously powerful aliens come to Earth and we defeat them with F-18s, I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be like, “For some reason, our missiles work on alien ships.” There’s a character in the first book who is explicitly that character, the guy who thinks we’re going to win with violence: we’re going to take their guns from them, and we’ll fight them, and we’ll defeat them with their own weapons, and we’ll win. That character is killed so matter-of-factly; the aliens are so much more powerful than that that the servant of their servant of their servant just kills those guys, and the actual overl