I hate to admit the same with regards to King. The man has truly gone off the deep end but he has a cadence that works so bloody well that even his scary lamp monster books are great reads.

Not surprised about the Expanse authors, nor would I be surprised to hear the same about the showrunners. I know folks in the industry and as you might expect they're all insanely far left, with the expected amount of political knowledge we've come to associate with liberal ideas (read: virtually none, with The Atlantic and NPR as primary sources for everything.