Alien invasions are such a common sci-fi plot line, most of us can write about them in our sleep.

Our stories usually go like this: Advanced extraterrestrials show up out of nowhere and launch a devastating attack on Earth. Humanity fights back and improbably finds a way to beat its cosmic foe, often with the help of stolen weaponry and a maverick scientist or two. Ultimately, the invaders are rebuffed, and Earth emerges stronger and more united than ever. 

From the get-go, it’s clear that Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s new series, The Captive’s War, is no ordinary alien invasion tale. Instead of Earth, we are on Anjiin, a distant exoplanet humans colonized generations ago. When a fleet of spaceships shows up on humanity’s doorstep, people are awestruck, but not entirely surprised—after all, their ancestors came from the stars, and many expected them to return.

When the attack comes, it is ruthless and catastrophic. The enemy rebuffs humanity’s defenses like a horse swatting flies, and in a matter of days, Anjiin is subdued. The survivors of the apocalypse are hauled away like chattel.

The Captive’s War, whose second installment The Faith of Beasts dropped last week, is essentially a far-future retelling of the Book of Daniel, an Old Testament tale about Israelites struggling to survive inside the Babylonian Empire. Of course, Abraham and Franck—who rose to sci-fi literary fame writing The Expanse novels under the pen name James S.A. Corey—have infused this ancient drama with a heaping dose of science. From silicon-based ecosystems to enemies that resemble highly evolved cockroaches, there’s no shortage of speculative biology to geek out over here, and nobody better to lead readers through it than the protagonists, who were some of Anjiin’s most celebrated biologists before becoming slaves in an intergalactic empire.

The Science of Fiction spoke with Abraham and Franck about what inspired The Captive’s War, how the duo weave real science into far-out space operas, and why arrogant academics are certain to follow us across the galaxy. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Maddie Stone: How has science shaped your career as a science fiction creator? And how do you think about the relationship between science and sci-fi?

Ty Franck: I think most people write about the things that they're interested in. You have a bunch of science nerds. If they start writing fiction, they tend to write science nerd fiction. That was definitely true in my case. I was always really into astronomy, especially the local bodies in our solar system; all the moons and planets. So when I was working on The Expanse, I just put all that stuff in there. With The Captive’s War, we drew a lot on Daniel's biology degree talking about things like convergent evolution.

Maddie: I didn't realize you had a bio degree, Daniel! Did you have a specific concentration? 

Daniel Abraham: I got my degree in the mid-90s, and so my concentration at the time was sort of the cutting edge of genetic engineering, which is now completely outdated. We felt like we were hot shit because we were making DNA tags. I think the apex of my science career was helping sequence yeast.

Maddie: When you approach a new topic and you want to weave science in, what’s your research process like? Do you go out and do a bunch of research upfront? Or do you start with the story you want to tell and insert the scientific details later?

Daniel: I think it goes back to what Ty was saying. What happens is we read Ed Young and we read Michael Pollan and we go and hang out with the guys at JPL [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory] and talk to the robotics guy at the convention. And then, like two years later, we write a book with all of that stuff already on board. All of the research is done out of excitement and curiosity. The story comes afterwards. 

Ty: Having said that, there are two times we actually did reach out to an expert for something that I'm aware of. And I think both of them were math related. I'm very bad at math. 

Maddie: Have there ever been moments where you wanted to include something, but it seemed too scientifically out there and you decided not to? 

Ty: We’re both big fans of Arthur C. Clark, and the [idea] that any sufficiently advanced technology will seem like magic. Which forgives a lot. You have things like the proto-molecule in The Expanse. To our poor humans in their clunky rocket ships, it seems like magic. And in The Captive's War, in the book that just came out, Faith of Beasts, there's descriptions of a battle between two technologically advanced species that are hurling enormous, unfathomable energies at each other. It is like a war between gods. There's no way to understand what's happening. You're just hoping not to get squashed like an ant. And I think that's okay. As long as it is entertaining and it fits the world that you've developed, I think you can get away with that stuff. 

Maddie: I've seen The Captive’s War described as a retelling of the Book of Daniel. Whose idea was that? 

Daniel: That was Ty's idea. It is a fundamentally interesting story — somebody who has been taken up by Babylon and put into the mechanism of the empire and rises up within it and is there to see it fall. That's not the usual invasion story that we've been seeing in science fiction. I am not a biblical scholar. I am not a great historian. Ty brings all of that to the table and I get to feed off of it. 

But then there are a bunch of other things that fed into it too. We dedicated the book to the folks from an episode of Radiolab that absolutely fits into the aesthetic. Ty had an interaction with a roboticist that was the core of the Livesuit story. [Editor’s note: Livesuit is a 2024 novella set in The Captive’s War universe.] All of these things have more than one root. 

Ty: Let’s give her a shout-out. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio is a professor of mechanical engineering, and we were at an event where she was demoing her soft robots: sleeves of robotic cloth that you can wrap around things and it turns whatever you wrapped it around into a controllable robot. And we were so fascinated by that, that we wound up with the whole Livesuit thing. So, my idea of doing the Book of Daniel as a sci-fi story and Rebecca's awesome demo of these soft robots and Daniel wanting to talk about some economic theories in fiction — all of that winds up in there. 

Maddie: The Expanse books have a lot of science in them, but it feels more relegated to the background. Whereas in The Captive’s War, science feels much more at the forefront. You have these protagonists who are all part of this superstar lab group, and the series starts with this very academic power struggle. What made you decide you wanted to put scientists, as well as the messy process of actually doing science, at the center of the drama?

Ty: There's a two part answer to that. The first part is, Daniel and I had a conversation about why would any alien species bother to conquer other planets? The old version, the one that was in old sci-fi movies and books, was that they came for our gold or they came for our water or they came for our women, whatever it was. But the things that we have here in our solar system are equally distributed throughout the entire universe. So that's not a good answer. So the answer we came up with was intelligence. Intelligence is rare. Intelligence is a limited resource in the universe. So if you're a species that values forcing other intelligences to invent things for you, that’s a resource that would be worth going and getting. So the beings that you would get are the people who do that—the scientists. That's what pushed us into having our characters, the ones who were carried off, be academics. 

And then the other reason is while we were coming up with this idea, my wife was finishing up her research PhD. So I was hearing every day about the stuff that goes on behind the scenes when you're getting a research PhD. And then Daniel had done some academic stuff when he was getting his biology degree. So there was a shared experience there. 

Maddie: Okay, that makes a lot of sense, because I do feel like you really nailed the power dynamics of academia. Tonner [a main character and head of the aforementioned lab group] feels like a stand-in for so many superstar scientists I’ve met. 

Daniel: I'm so sorry. 

Ty: Yeah. And the more famous your school is the more that's just amplified. Like, if you're the professor of something at MIT, that does not decrease your ego.

Maddie: Anjiin has this quasi-crystal, silicon-based ecology. What got you interested in the idea of silicon based life?

Daniel: Because silicon is right next to carbon on the periodic table, it has some of the same chaining possibilities that make it exotic but plausible. The idea of something that's an aperiodic crystal that you could use to pass on information from generation to generation with some mutations and some selection, and so you wind up with evolution rolling in and then all of a sudden you've got this whole other tree of life? Those are thoughts and speculations that I got from reading Stephen Jay Gould and Lewis Thomas. 

Ty: The thing I liked about it from a storytelling perspective is you have two completely different trees of life on a planet that do not cross. People say 'oh if you go to an alien planet, you'll get an alien virus.' I've always thought that was kind of a ridiculous idea. I liked that you can be side by side with this other tree of life and there's no cross pollination. You have roommates that don't talk. You have trees competing with each other for sunlight, and pulling water out of the soil. But that's the extent of it. 

Maddie: So then, how did you think about the process of making those two trees of life compatible with one another? Because that's also pretty central to the plot: you have this group of scientists who have figured out how to bridge the divide, and that's ultimately why they're carted off by the Carryx. To accomplish what they accomplished on Anjiin with other life forms. 

Daniel: Well, what you're talking about is whether something is, especially on the protein level, substrate specific or not. If you have a whole separate set of gene producing quasicrystals, that through a different code and a different transferase and different mRNA analog, makes the same sucrose, it doesn't matter. It's still sucrose. And part of what's interesting about that for me is there are these different levels at which biology can talk to other parts of biology. 

Maddie: Did you run these ideas by any biologist friends of yours? 

Daniel: I saw no advantage to getting told that I was wrong. 

Maddie: Why did you decide you wanted to tell an alien invasion story on a different planet? 

Ty: I was forced to read a lot of the Bible when I was a kid and I've been trying to make it useful ever since. And I was always fascinated by the story in Daniel, that you're basically a dirt farmer, and then this gigantic, massively technologically advanced empire shows up, wipes your country out in a couple of days and drags all the promising young men off and says, ‘by the way, you work for the empire now.’ What that would be like to be forced into this bureaucracy of the people that just conquered you. And the thing I think both Daniel and I engaged with is that is there's no chance to beat them. The classic alien invasion story is aliens attack Earth and Earth fights back. And somehow we can shoot down UFOs with our F18s. I love those movies. They're silly fun, but it doesn't make any sense. Daniel was never going to defeat the Babylonians. So that's not the story. The story is now that you're on the inside and now that you're a member of the bureaucracy, are there ways that you can undermine them? Which I think is a much more interesting way of dealing with the alien invasion story. And it ties back to the people on Ajiin being colonizers of that planet. And then the Carryx come and colonize them. It does feel like the big fish eating the little fish all the way down. 

Having aliens show up that are way better than us in some way would be a bit of a blow.

Maddie: I just finished reading a book on aliens called First Contact. There’s a whole chapter in there devoted to how human societies might react to first contact with an advanced alien race: how it will affect world religions, how we'll apply our own sense of ethics and human rights to an alien species. And one thing I wondered after reading your books is how different it might be making contact in a situation where we have some sense that we are aliens. My gut is that there would be some sort of baked-in awareness that there is intelligent alien life in the cosmos, maybe even some significant research programs devoted to seeking it out? 

Ty:  That's in the book. When they first detect what seem to be alien ships flying into their solar system, their first thought is, is this us? They know they're not from Anjiin. So when they see ships show up, they're like, ‘oh maybe it's the other humans finally come to reconnect with us.’ So yes, I think that does cushion the blow quite a bit. I think it would be much more devastating for us, where a large portion of our planet believes that we are God's chosen people. Having aliens show up that are way better than us in some way would be a bit of a blow. And in human history anytime an isolated culture has come in contact with an outside, much more technologically advanced culture, the small isolated culture invariably is destroyed. And I think the reality is for us here on Earth, if a bunch of super advanced aliens showed up and said, ‘hey, we're here and we're super friendly and we are not gonna kill you,’ it would still destroy our culture. It's just part of how that works.

Maddie: Can you talk about your process for imagining alien intelligences? Were you looking at different Earth animals for inspiration? 

Daniel: A lot of it was pulling from ideas about superorganisms. The kind of speculative thing that we did was 'what would it be like to have a superorganism in which each individual member of the superorganism was fully sentient?' So we have these Carryx that are entirely aware of themselves. They have fully developed senses of self. And yet they are totally biologically determined by their place in their society. That's ants. That's termites. But it's termites that are capable of complaining on Yelp. 

Ty: That was the part that interested me. I mean, if you live in a town with a mayor, you can disagree with the mayor. The mayor can say, ‘here's the new law’ and we can decide not to do that. The Carryx live in a world where if the mayor comes up to you and says, ‘you have to do the thing,’ he sprays a chemical in your face and changes you biologically to where you have to do the thing. But you're aware that it's happening. There's something sort of creepy and weird and interesting about that idea.

Maddie: The Faith of Beasts is now out. Can you talk about any major new scientific terrain it explores or ideas you're excited about?

Daniel Abraham: The thing that came out in The Faith of Beasts that I think is the philosophical and scientific core of it, for me, is the idea that the environment teaches you how to exist within it. That's the thing that drives convergent evolution. Anytime you're around light, it's a good idea to build an eye, so you have a bunch of different things building an eye. Anytime you're in an atmosphere thick enough to fly, something's going to figure out how to fly. What the environment is teaches you how to exist there. And that's also true for us. It's the whole idea of the interplay between the individuals and the environment and how we shape each other. That's kind of what that whole project is sitting with. 

Maddie: What is it like for you adapting a book for TV and being as involved as I presume you are? [Editor’s note: Abraham and Franck were writers and producers on The Expanse TV series, and are now developing an upcoming Captive’s War series for Amazon MGM Studios.]

Daniel: Working on The Expanse was an absolute education. The shift between prose and filmmaking was profound. And the reason I think it worked at all is that we got to go in there as useful tools for the showrunner. This was not our show. This was their show and we got to keep them from running down some wrong roads and save them some time. And that was a gift to them and an opportunity for us. 

I will always remember this. When we were very early in the process of making The Expanse, we were trying to figure out how to portray Belters on screen. [Editor’s note: Belters have lived in the asteroid belt for generations, and their bodies have changed dramatically as a result of the low gravity.] And while it would be great to have a huge population of tall, skinny actors with great big heads who were also great actors, it seemed optimistic. And so they were looking for other ways to kind of visually tell the story of the Belters. And very early on, someone floated the idea of making the Belters have embraced cybernetics and have a lot of robotics incorporated into their bodies. Almost more machine than human. And Ty said 'you could do that, but it would undercut everything that we're saying in the show. It's a show about shared humanity and if you make them not human, you break everything.' And the showrunning was like, oh, yeah, you're right. 

Maddie: Where does the name James S. A. Corey come from? 

Daniel: When we started doing this, I had a strong opinion about writing. And the idea was the way you write a successful book is you meet the reader's expectations, and the way that you meet the reader's expectations is you set them. And the strongest way to set them is by who writes the book. You know, you pick up a Stephen King book, you know what you're getting. And you pick up a John Grisham book, you know what you're getting. If you pick a Daniel Abraham book, Daniel Abraham writes kind of overly cerebral epic fantasy. Nothing that we do is gonna be a good Daniel Abraham book, no matter how good the book is. So we need a new name. My middle name is James, Ty's middle name is Corey, we put a couple initials in so that it would stand out and look weird, be more memorable.

Ty: All the best writers have two middle initials, and “RR” was already taken. 

Daniel: And my daughter's initials are SA, so we threw those in. And that's it. We had a guy.