Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection

by James S.A. Corey

You remember Will & Grace, right? It was a sitcom with Eric McCormack and Debra Messing. It was also maybe the most widely missed obscure philosophy joke in popular culture. Will and Grace are common first names, but put together like that, they’re also one of the central questions of Western philosophy—how much we are self-determined and how much we are controlled by deterministic forces. Agents of our own free will or else predestined cogs whose fates are out of our hands, determined instead by the grace of God. Freedom or necessity. Will or Grace.

This is author commentary, BTW.

“I know men like Jandro. People are scared and they’re hurting, yeah? And some big man comes along, and he seems confident. He looks sure of himself. All the things that are eating at your heart, they aren’t eating at his. And yeah, he gets a team. Everyone falls in line behind him, and bad things happen. The worst things.”

And the end isn’t really entirely the end. One of the central arguments we’ve made with these stories is that, when you look at history, you see the same kind of people doing the same stupid, selfish, delusional, gorgeous, kind, astonishing things that we do today. And we’ll keep doing the same, as long as the species survives. Technical knowledge advances. The organism stays the same. And, to quote Nami from her younger days: We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.