I think the show portrays Mars as China. The US is the declining empire, and China is on the rise. They also portray Marco Inaros as a sociopathic leader with a horrible temper. The show has a clear “both sides bad” vibe. Don’t know if the books are the same.
Books are worse. Show portrays Belters more positive than books which are “all sides bad”.
Or, more exactly, books are heavily “power structures bad” anarchist vibes, let’s just have decentralised spacefaring civilisation (someone surely will make the spaceships as a hobby), though it’s subverted in book 2 by that botanist having long speech about how hard is to have civilisation in space without Earth even for purely technical and logistic reasons and that belter extremists are nuts. Then Inaros bombs Earth and later Belters become Spacing Guild like monopolists and thus also becoming bad power structure.
That botanist was btw right in universe, humanity barely survived the closing of the gates. Ending show us severely depopulated Earth centuries later (i assume Mars died out by that time).
I think the show portrays Mars as China. The US is the declining empire, and China is on the rise. They also portray Marco Inaros as a sociopathic leader with a horrible temper. The show has a clear “both sides bad” vibe. Don’t know if the books are the same.
Books are worse. Show portrays Belters more positive than books which are “all sides bad”.
Or, more exactly, books are heavily “power structures bad” anarchist vibes, let’s just have decentralised spacefaring civilisation (someone surely will make the spaceships as a hobby), though it’s subverted in book 2 by that botanist having long speech about how hard is to have civilisation in space without Earth even for purely technical and logistic reasons and that belter extremists are nuts. Then Inaros bombs Earth and later Belters become Spacing Guild like monopolists and thus also becoming bad power structure.
That botanist was btw right in universe, humanity barely survived the closing of the gates. Ending show us severely depopulated Earth centuries later (i assume Mars died out by that time).