James S. A. Corey

James S. A. Corey is not one person but two: Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, a writing partnership that has produced some of the most celebrated science fiction of the twenty-first century. The pen name itself is constructed from pieces of both men — James is Abraham's middle name, Corey is Franck's, and the initials S. A. belong to Abraham's daughter. The name was also chosen deliberately to evoke the space opera authors of the 1970s, a lineage the duo have always worn openly.

Abraham came to the collaboration with an established solo career behind him. He is the author of the Long Price Quartet, the Dagger and the Coin series, and the Kithamar Trilogy — fantasy works that demonstrated a gift for morally complex worlds and patient, character-driven storytelling. Franck, meanwhile, had spent years building the solar system setting that would eventually become The Expanse, originally conceived as a backdrop for a role-playing game. When the two began writing together in earnest, that setting became the foundation for something far larger than either had initially planned.

Their debut as James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes, was published in 2011 and announced their arrival with immediate force. The novel was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2012, and it established the template for everything that followed: a colonised solar system fractured along class and political lines, with Earth and Mars in cold rivalry and the Belters — those born in the asteroid belt, labouring to extract wealth they rarely benefit from — caught between the two powers. The series never loses sight of the human scale within that enormous political canvas.

Over the following decade, Abraham and Franck published eight further novels in The Expanse: Caliban's War, Abaddon's Gate, Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games, Babylon's Ashes, Persepolis Rising, Tiamat's Wrath, and finally Leviathan Falls in 2021. Abaddon's Gate won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and in 2020 the complete series won the Hugo Award for Best Series, having been nominated for the same prize in 2017. The series sold more than twelve million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than twenty-three languages. Alongside the nine novels, the duo produced a substantial body of shorter fiction set in the same universe, later collected in Memory's Legion.

The collaboration extended well beyond prose. Abraham and Franck wrote and produced the television adaptation of The Expanse, which ran for six seasons — first on Syfy, then on Amazon Prime Video after the cable channel cancelled it following its third season. Both the book series and the television adaptation received Hugo Awards, a distinction that underlines how completely the two formats reinforced each other.

Their work under the Corey name also includes Honor Among Thieves, a Star Wars novel published in 2014 as part of the Empire and Rebellion line, and contributions to anthologies edited by George R. R. Martin, for whom Abraham had previously worked as a personal assistant.

The Expanse concluded, but the partnership did not. In 2024 they launched The Captive's War, a new space opera trilogy beginning with The Mercy of Gods, which became an instant New York Times bestseller on its release in August of that year. Where The Expanse concerned itself with a colonised solar system and the discovery of something ancient and alien beyond a network of gates, the new series moves into different territory, placing humanity in a war for survival against an empire far older than our own civilisation.

In November 2024, Abraham and Franck announced the formation of Expanding Universe, a multi-platform content company developed in partnership with Naren Shankar and director Breck Eisner, with a development deal at Amazon MGM Studios focused on adapting The Captive's War for screen. The duo have also made their collaborative writing process unusually transparent, opening a live novel-writing project to their Patreon audience — an experiment they have compared to Harlan Ellison's famous practice of writing in bookshop windows. Both Abraham and Franck are based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.