The Expanse: Memory's Legion by James S.A. Corey

As I have chronicled here in the past, The Expanse novels were accompanied by a series of short stories and novellas fleshing out the world and characters of the main series of nine novels. These were all released in electronic format originally, and I read them in between the novels, reviewing them on this blog. Once the series was complete, the stories were collected in a single hardcover edition, and I picked that up so I'd have a volume to match the rest of the series even though I'd read them before; over the past few weeks I read the volume, picking up stories in between Hugo finalists.

The stories were:

1. "Drive" (2012): about the often-mentioned inventor of the Epstein drive
2. "The Butcher of Anderson Station" (2011): how Fred Johnson went from hunter of Belter terrorists to advocate for their cause
3. "Gods of Risk" (2012): about a cousin of Bobbie Draper's after the events of book two
4. "The Churn" (2014): the backstory of Amos on Earth 
5. "The Vital Abyss" (2015): a side story about a group of kidnapped scientists working on the protomolecule
6. "Strange Dogs" (2017): kids growing up on a Laconian subject world 
7. "Auberon" (2019): the governor of a Laconian subject world discovers maintaining order is harder than he thought
8. "The Sins of Our Fathers" (2022): follows up a loose strand about Naomi's terrorist child, long after the events of the rest of the series

If you want my thoughts on individual stories, you can get them above. As I mentioned in my review of Ann Leckie's Lake of Souls, one of the benefits of a reading a single-author collection is it allows you to really triangulate an author's interests, figure out what kind of themes and ideas drive them.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection by James S.A. Corey

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2011-22
Acquired: July 2024
Read: May 2025

It would be easy, I think, to dismiss James S.A. Corey as a pulp writer, someone who write competent action-adventure but not more than that, a sort of John Scalzi figure, the kind of writer with little to say. But to do that would be unfair to Corey, who I think—if this doesn't sound too weird—is honestly a better and more thoughtful writer than they need to be. Reading this volume shows how much Corey is engaged in a bigger project than political thrillers and spaceship combat.

Of particular note to me, I think, is how interested Corey is in empathy: who do we connect to, and how our ability to build connections enables or disables our ability to commit violence. You can find traces of this in all of these stories, but in particular it runs through "The Butcher of Anderson Station," "The Churn," "The Vital Abyss," and "Auberon." "Butcher" is about a man who commits an unjustified act of violence, and whose ability to empathize leads him to switch sides as a result. Both "The Churn" and "The Vital Abyss" are about people without empathy, but opposite sides of the same coin: "The Churn" explores a man who cannot empathize but desperately wants to, and so seeks out others who can help guide his violence appropriately; "Vital Abyss" focuses on a man who did have the ability to empathize, and purposefully got rid of it so that he could commit violent acts. (This is a very real phenomenon that Elana Gomel discusses quite compellingly in her monograph Bloodscripts: how do we convince ourselves that other human beings are sufficiently different from us that we are okay with hurting them?) "Auberon" comes at this idea from a different direction, showing us how a Laconian governor's empathy compromises him—his love for his wife stops him from carrying out his duty, even as he also has the ability to kill his own subordinates to further the Laconian cause! Meanwhile, his enemies understand him well enough to manipulate and control him.

Outside of violence, other stories consider other consequences of empathy: "Gods of Risk," for example, follows how a teenage boy's seeming feelings for a girl lead him in dangerous directions, while "The Sins of Our Fathers" focuses on how one character regains his ability to work with groups after a lifetime of isolation. Perhaps the most potent story in this regard, though, is "Strange Dogs": in their author's note on the story, Corey argues it's about immigration, about how children of immigrants do things their parents just don't understand because what seems normal to them is alien to their parent. And I think that's true—but you might also have called it "Strange Empathy," as what distinguishes the children from their parents is their ability to empathize with the alien... even when that alien is deeply disturbing to your parents.

There's a lot about childhood here, actually: being a child trying to escape the burdens imposed on you by your parents is the point of (in varying degrees) "Gods of Risk," "The Churn," "Vital Abyss," "Strange Dogs," and "Sins of Our Fathers." As a character in that last story says, "our parents can lay burdens on us, all without meaning to, that we'll have to carry around for the rest of our lives and there's nothing we can do about that. But you and I still get to decided how we carry those burdens." Broaden the idea of "parent" and you get, I would argue, the whole thesis of The Expanse. Those who have come before us have set the stage for us: they've given us politics and violence and economics and religion and all these other systems that have shaped our lives. We can't escape those influences, but we get to decide what we do with them.

The universe is, after all, a place where anything can happen: a wide open expanse.