James S.A. Corey Books

James S.A. Corey is two people. Daniel Abraham was an established fantasy novelist and Ty Franck was running a sprawling homebrew game setting when the two of them, both in George R.R. Martin's orbit in New Mexico, decided to turn that setting into a novel. The result was Leviathan Wakes in 2011, the opening book of The Expanse, and it launched one of the defining science fiction series of the century so far.

The Expanse ran nine novels, from Leviathan Wakes through Leviathan Falls in 2021, plus a handful of novellas, and won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2020. It follows the crew of a salvaged gunship called the Rocinante as a cold war between Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt collides with an ancient alien technology that does not care about human politics. What makes it work is not the hardware, it is the people: James Holden's exhausting idealism, Amos Burton's cheerful menace, Naomi Nagata's competence, and a ship's crew that becomes the genre's best argument for found family outside of fantasy. The books also became a beloved TV adaptation that ran six seasons.

In 2024 the duo started something new with The Mercy of Gods, the first book of The Captive's War. Humanity's descendants on a distant colony world are conquered by the Carryx, an alien empire that keeps useful species as working captives, and a team of scientists has to survive inside the machine that owns them. The novella Livesuit followed the same year, and the second novel, The Faith of Beasts, arrived in 2026. It is darker and more claustrophobic than The Expanse, a story about resistance under total power, and it is some of their sharpest writing.

Let's be honest about why they are on a romantasy site: this is genre ancestry and a palate cleanser, not romantasy. Corey books register a 0 to 1 on our spice guide. Romance exists, Holden and Naomi are one of science fiction's steadiest couples, but it happens in the background while the plot does the driving. Nobody is buying these for the yearning.

So who should pick them up? Readers who came into fantasy through Fourth Wing's war-college structure and want to see large-scale conflict handled by masters of pacing. Readers who love a crew, a ship, and banter under fire. Anyone burned out on romance arcs who wants pure momentum for a book or nine, then plans to come back to the enemies to lovers shelf refreshed. Abraham's solo fantasy work also rewards fans of slow political scheming, if you go digging.

The partnership itself is worth understanding, because it explains the books' consistency. Abraham brings the character work and prose discipline of a veteran fantasy novelist, Franck brings a world he spent years stress-testing, and they draft alternating viewpoints before editing each other into a single voice. That is why nine books and a decade of deadlines never produced a lazy entry. The structure is distinctive too: every Expanse novel rotates through a small set of point-of-view characters, so you always know whose eyes you are behind, and the duology-like arcs inside the larger series give each book a real ending. It is craft you can feel even when you cannot see it, and it is the reason the series finale actually satisfies, which almost no nine-book series manages.

Start with Leviathan Wakes and read The Expanse in publication order; the series builds its payoffs patiently and the final trilogy lands hard because of everything before it. If you want the newer, meaner Corey, The Mercy of Gods is a clean entry point since The Captive's War assumes no Expanse knowledge at all. Either way you are in the hands of writers who know exactly what they are doing.