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Published Apr 23, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT
'Star Wars is never going to stop. And Star Trek is the same way. If you have a big universe, it is expected you will just keep dipping in that well.'
Image: Orbit BooksReading The Mercy of Gods and The Faith of Beasts, the first two novels in James S.A. Corey’s terrific far-future space-opera trilogy, The Captive’s War, it’s hard to imagine how this story is going to wrap up in just one more book. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck — authors of the Expanse book series and producers of the TV adaptation, who write together under the Corey name — originally announced Captive’s War as a trilogy. Given the story’s vast setting and the overwhelming challenges the protagonists face, though, it feels like this series could go on for years.
But Abraham and Franck are determined not to fall into a Star Wars/Star Trek rut by stretching the story out beyond their original plan. And they sound a little piqued at the idea that they might not be able to wrap it all up with one more installment.
“I don't know why everybody's so worried that we're not going to,” Abraham tells Polygon. “All this is following the outline we put together when we started the project. So it's all very much as expected, pretty much in the scope of what we thought we were doing.”
2024’s The Mercy of Gods introduces a vast setting dominated by an ancient race, the Carryx, that's enslaved or eliminated untold numbers of species across the universe. (You can read the first chapter here.) The Carryx, which consider all other species to be “animals,” routinely destroy entire worlds, wiping out any intelligent life that doesn’t prove useful to them. In Mercy of Gods, when they add humanity to their collection of “animals of use,” newly enslaved lab worker Dafyd Alkhor sets out to understand the Carryx and fight back against their rapacious empire.
Image: OrbitThe new sequel Faith of Beasts moves the story forward rapidly. (Read the first chapter here.) But Dafyd and his inner circle agree that bringing down the Carryx might be the work of generations. And it certainly seems like the process of a few determined humans undermining an entire galactic empire could be the work of another nine-book series like The Expanse, if Franck and Abraham wanted it to be.
Instead, Franck says, their plans are for one more novel and one related novella — and maybe the television adaptation of the trilogy they’re developing with Amazon MGM. “Then out, onto something else.”
“With The Expanse — we did the outline on that when we were starting to work on Caliban's War,” Abraham says. “We knew it was going to be a nine-book series very early in the game. That never really changed. So there's not been a lot of scope creep, or mission creep, when we've been doing these things together. It's pretty much followed what we thought it was going to be.”
“We have more self-control than George [R.R. Martin] does,” Franck says.
Franck worked for Martin, GMed for him, and has cited him as a business mentor. Martin’s Game of Thrones franchise — five mainline books and counting, plus many spin-offs — was also originally planned as a trilogy.
While Franck and Abraham did once write a Star Wars tie-in novel under the James S.A. Corey name — the 2014 Star Wars Legends book Honor Among Thieves — they both say they don’t want to get stuck writing long-running franchises that recycle the same ideas and plots in the interest of churning out content for fans. That’s why they called a full stop to expanding The Expanse once they were done with their planned story. They want to do the same with The Captive’s War.
“We live in a world where every large universe is supposed to be endlessly flogged,” Franck says. “Star Wars is never going to stop. It's told the same story a thousand times at this point. The evil Empire has been defeated over and over and over again. It always comes back. Plucky Rebels have to defeat the new iteration of it over and over and over again. It just endlessly repeats. And Star Trek is the same way. If you have a big universe, it is expected you will just keep dipping in that well over and over until you die, and then somebody else will take over and do it for you. Daniel and I don't enjoy that. We like endings. We like getting to an end: ‘Here's the end, and it's over.’”
Image: Orbit BooksFranck credits Abraham for coming up with a saying that sums up their feelings about longrunning series: “At some point, if you keep going, you become your own cover band.”
“We never want to do that,” Franck says. “We never want to become our own cover band, where you're just endlessly repeating what you said, and writing a slightly different version of the same story you've written a thousand times before. That would bore the shit out of me.”
Abraham says that yes, The Captive’s War universe is immense, but only because it was the correct size for the story he and Franck are telling. And even though the history of Carryx warfare could invite literally endless spin-offs, Abraham rejects the idea of setting other stories within the universe they built for this trilogy.
“When you do the world-building of a universe, if it's doing the right thing, it actually informs and speaks to the plot of the story you're telling,” he says. “There are other stories you can tell in that universe, but this is the one related to the world-building. This is the satisfying one. If we have a different story after this, we'll build the universe that fits it well. What story you're telling — you get to play with the universe and make it the right fit. If you're stuck [telling stories set] in one universe, it doesn't seem like it works as well. It doesn't seem like, from a craft perspective, it'd be as good.”
“I mean, there are monetary reasons to do that,” Franck says. “Obviously Star Wars and Star Trek and other things like them make a jillion dollars, basically repeating themselves over and over again. But pretty early on, Daniel and I divorced the creative side from the monetary side. We don't make creative decisions for strictly monetary reasons. And I think both of us are more satisfied with our careers because of it.”
“Unfortunately,” Abraham says, “they paid us enough that they can't force us by offering us more money.”
The Faith of Beasts is available now.
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