The Mercy of Gods: Just as good as one would expect it to be

The Mercy of Gods by James S. Corey

After the brilliance that was THE EXPANSE, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (collectively writing as James S. Corey) are back with The Mercy of Gods (2024), the first book in their new series, THE CAPTIVE’S WAR, and it’s just as good as one would expect it to be. While it shares some narrative DNA with the prior series, The Mercy of Gods is more, um, expansive than THE EXPANSE, spanning more intergalactic space, employing more futuristic technology, and introducing readers to a slew of alien races.

The story opens on the planet Anjiin, a planet where “Humans, everyone knew, didn’t belong.” Life, silicon-carbon based, had arisen on the planet billions of years ago, but “three and a half thousand years ago, and apparently out of nowhere, humans showed up,” along with other Earth lifeforms including dogs and bees and plants. A number of different stories/myths explain the sudden arrival, but the reality is lost in time. Over the millennia, the two life systems coexisted with little interaction, until now, when a small research team made a major breakthrough in allowing the two to “translate” across biomes, “crack [ing] open the possibility of a new, integrated biology.” Unfortunately for them, they did so on the eve of Anjiin being attacked and conquered in brutally swift and efficient fashion by the Carryx, a far more advanced space-faring species that has done the same to innumerable other worlds/species, wiping out those it cannot domesticate and forcing the rest into being of “utility” to the Carryx empire. As one of the Carryx put it: anything that can be subjugated must be [in an] endless, iterative testing of ourselves against the universe.”

As a regular part of that subjugation, the Carryx remove from their conquered planets the “best of the best”, bringing them to a more central planet and testing them to see how their “moiety” can be of use (or not) to the empire. Thus, the research team finds themselves separated, thrown into spaceships, and brought to a large facility populated by other subjugated species, each of them given some sort of task to prove their worth.

The scientific team/captives include: Dafyd Alkhor, a young research assistant with a good mind for politics/personal dynamics; Tonner Freis, the brilliant, highly focused, and somewhat arrogant team leader; Else Yannin, the team’s second leader, nearly as brilliant and currently in a relationship with Tonner as well as the subject of a crush by Dafyd; Nöl and Synnia, an older married couple; Jessyn, a younger researcher and sister to one of the scientists who first spotted the invading Carryx ships; Irinna, the youngest of the group; Campar, and Rickar. A few others captives make up the rest of the human contingent, with the rest of the named characters rounded out by a pair of Carryx and a character referenced as “the swarm,” of which I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers, save to note that it is one of the most fascinating characters in the novel with a moving, compelling arc.

The shared DNA with THE EXPANSE I noted lies mainly with character. The obvious ones are multiple points of view, as we shift amongst the various characters (not just the human ones) and a focus on a small group acting, in their better moments, as a team. The more important one is the focus on character. While this is billed as “space opera”, and we do get a space battle, a planetary invasion, and great interstellar distances being traveled, this first book is more about diving into the characters themselves and their interactions with each other (I assume more things will blow up in later books, though this one is not without its own moments of things going boom). There’s a bit more of a sense of distance here, both between the characters and between the characters and the reader, but the author’s happily take the time to allow these characters to fully form in our heads, to grow, to deal in various individual ways with trauma, to have that trauma affect their thinking, their behavior, their relationships. It’s a book built not simply around “what happens next” but “what will these people do and how will it affect them and those around them?” I wouldn’t be surprised if some find it a bit slow, particularly perhaps the first half and especially with that “space opera” tag, but for me the richness of character is a true strength and one that requires time.

Characterization, however, is not the only strength. Far from it. The worldbuilding is another. Not so much in setting, though the descriptions are vivid and well done, but in the creation of the Carryx empire and philosophy, as well as in the varied other alien species we see. The Carryx are absolutely fascinating: strongly hierarchical and with a quasi hive-mind structure that allows for more individual freedom of action and thought (to some extent) but all within an absolutely rigid group system, one that has another hiv-ish sort of connection and consequence that is absolutely fascinating but that I won’t spoil here. We don’t get the same level of detail with the other species, but what we do see is equally imaginative and original. Even better, many of them remain truly alien, as opposed to just humans with different forms.

The plot is tautly compelling, building tension out of a number of sources, including but not limited to: interpersonal tension amongst Dafyd’s group in terms of leadership, the right approach to solving their task and dealing with the aliens, and jealousy; tensions among various human groups in how or even whether to fight back against the Carryx; tension over trying to complete the task given them by the Carryx before other subjugated species do; fights with those other species; the identity of the swarm character, as well as its motives/purpose; interior tension as characters try to deal with their own various issues of survivor guilt, desire for vengeance, fear, grief, and more. It’s a slow pace in that as mentioned it takes it times to flesh out the characters, as well as to let the tensions build, resolve, build again. So effectively slow versus a pace that bogs down.

Thematically, this is a story that as mentioned deals a lot with trauma. It’s also, at this point at least, more a survival story than a resistance story, or maybe a better way of putting it is it’s a story where survival is the resistance. As opposed to the typical alien invasion storyline where aliens kick butt for a while until the plucky Earthlings manage to upload a Mac virus into their system, fly fighter planes into a field of light, or go all Red Dawn on them. As one character says to another:

You’re pretty fucked up. We’re all fucked up. Look at us. Tonner’s tripling down on the research thing because it’s something he understands. Synnia’s completely shut down. Rickar’s focused on all of us being mad at him so that he doesn’t have to think about the rest of it … We’re all broken. We’re trying to find something we can control because we can’t control anything … None of us are okay. That’s all right. We don’t have to be. It’s all right to be fucked up now.

Later, another thinks how

Life went on. That was the terrible thing … They were killed, or made to watch the people they loved die. And then, at some point, they were hungry. Thirsty. They had to piss … It felt like it should have stopped, all of it, and it didn’t. The slow, low pulse of being alive kept making its demands … the mundane insisted on its cut.

What is intriguing though about the idea of resistance is that the book opens with an entry from one of the Carryx (in a record we return to multiple times throughout the novel) telling us the Carryx were eventually defeated: “We brought fire, death, and chains to Anjiin … And in that is our regret … I would not now be telling you the chronicle of our failure. We did not see the adversary for what he was, and w brought him into our home.”

We’ll have to wait for the rest of the books to see how that happens. Based on The Mercy of Gods, the journey will be well worth it.