The Mercy of Gods, by James S.A. Corey

Book review

My wife knew I loved The Expanse series even more than I liked the TV series, and I liked the series a lot, so she got me this book for Christmas. James S.A. Corey, the pen name for the duo of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, has launched a new series, The Captive’s War, and if the first book is any indication it will be another great one.

This science fiction series starts out on the planet of Anjiin, a human colony isolated for thousands of years with no memory of Earth, with a level of technology more or less equivalent to our own.

Alien invaders called the Carryx show up, make short work of the colony’s military, cull 1/8th of the population just to show they take obedience to them seriously, and then kidnap all of Anjiin’s best and brightest to haul them off to a world with gargantuan structures housing the gargantuan Carryx and many of their conquered species.

There, the humans, in our case a bunch of mostly scientists, are the subjects of a very alien experiment to determine whether humans are useful to the Carryx. If they’re not, then their existence serves no purpose and will end.

It’s a good thing Corey’s characters are not taken from our best and brightest, I have to say that; if they were the whole series would maybe fill a novella at most.

Fortunately, a few of Corey’s characters are pretty bright, and start figuring out how to survive another day, another week, because that’s the only option besides death at the hands, or claws or teeth or mandibles, of the Carryx or their other slave species.

And it turns out the Carryx are involved at least a centuries-old interstellar war with an equally alien species, which sends a little swarm of nanobot-like-maybe-partly-organic things that is sentient, and can possess human beings in a strangely empathic way.

Both the Carryx and their enemy spy start to learn some things from their human subjects as well, things as alien to them as they are to humanity and maybe—no, knowing Carey probably will—end up posing an existential threat to one or both in some later book in the series.

The human characters are believable, mostly sympathetic, often insightful and sometimes incredibly foolish, as anyone might be in such bizarre circumstances. The Carryx aren’t evil as far as they see things, but seem to have a very Carryx-centric view of the galaxy. The enemy is about as mysterious as the enemy of the protomolecule in The Expanse, but unlike that one, it can love.

And the alien technology, of course, is downright godlike. Of course it is! James SA Corey imagined it, and that seems to be his sci-fi specialty which he does very well indeed.

If you want to start in on a new and fascinating sci-fi series, I think you’ll enjoy this book. If you like The Expanse, I know you will.

Thanks for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

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