u/AgentOfDibella

Was this one of the station's defense bots?

"To Jim’s right, something huge shifted. A buzz filled his ears like a swarm of hornets that didn’t register on the suit’s instruments, and something that was like light but also wasn’t flowed through the walls. Adrenaline hit his system, and his heart started tapping anxiously against his ribs. Whatever it was shifted, faded, and moved on without quite entering the chamber. Jim had never seen a whale breaching, but he thought he understood something of how it would feel to be next to one when it did. Neither Tanaka nor Teresa seemed to have noticed anything. He checked his medical stats. According to the suit, he was running a little over thirty-eight degrees. A fever, but not high enough to generate hallucinations. “No, that was real,” Miller said. “Just a little reminder that we’re out of our depth here.”"

Some similarities to other fictional universes

1. I have skimmed through the lore of Warhammer 40k and Duarte (and Holden for a little bit) in the end were like the emperor from the Warhammer universe, a single semi dead person stopping the other dimension from annihilating ours. Of course it is a shallow comparison as Duarte was being heavily influenced by the Gate Engineers (Romans) and wasn't really saving humanity per se.

2. The theme of a God emperor across so many settings surprises me - Dune, Warhammer, The Expanse. Duarte even started gaining superhuman powers like Leto 1 and 2. You would think given the vastness of the universe, centralized power would be harder to enforce. Yet it seems to be not so.

3. I love the power armor and its similarities to power armor from Fallout (except the inbuilt guns ig). Mechanized armor seems to be very likely in our real future too.

4. Belters (and later the Transport Union) start looking like precursors to the spacing guild from Dune, where living in space for millenia may result in them become very visually different from humans, perhaps even turning into another species.

5. Another thing I noticed that was in common with other works of fiction like Dune, Warhammer, and even Cyberpunk: technology and medical science is extremely advanced but quality of life is terrible. People in the expanse universe eat terrible food, even in gravity wells. Earth is a hopeless place for most of the population on basic. Crime and poverty haven't really reduced. The only exception I can think of is pre ring gate Mars: everyone seemed to have a goal and from Alex's description of his home visit, they had a good standard of living and food as well.

6. Humanity's spread across the ~1300 habitable systems and then the shutdown of the ring system reminds me of the scattering that occured after Leto 2's tyrant rule

Some differences: I noticed that AI and robots were not that big of a menace in this universe, whereas a lot of other fictional works have rogue AI and robotics in some form. Maybe humanity hasn't advanced enough to have made almost autonomous AI yet?