James S.A. Corey, the authors of The Expanse series (I still need to read this), have come back with a brand new space opera series called The Captive's War. In the first of series, The Mercy of Gods, a group of human researchers is living on the planet of Anjiin until The Carryx, an empire who have enslaved species across the galaxy, come sweeping in.

The way James S.A. Corey captured the human psyche was incredible. We got to see a variety of perspectives (including non-human) with each character developing over time. Their emotions, motivations and consequences all made sense to me and it was easy to empathise with them. The way that mental health and trauma was explored felt nuanced and realistic.

Next, the universe they created was absolutely insane. I've never seen such a wide array of aliens, all of which I could clearly visualise. The science aspects were intriguing without feeling too complex.

In terms of the pacing, I'll admit that the first 10% were a bit slower as the initial setup was explored. However, after this, the pacing was spectacular and the pay off was entirely worthwhile. I loved the way the story was structured and was left feeling like this is just the very beginning of something huge.

Overall, I highly recommend picking this one up if you're interested in a sci-fi focused on humanity, loss and rebellion. I can't wait to see how everything plays out. In the meantime, I'll definitely be picking up The Expanse series.

Thank you to @hachetteaus for providing an eARC for review via @netgalley. All opinions are my own.

My full review on my blog.

My experience with Corey’s books, namely The Expanse series, had been a complex one. While I very much enjoyed the beginning of the series, and gave Leviathan’s Wake 8/10, the subsequent installments were decidedly less fun for me and I ended my reading adventure on Nemesis Games – which, while better than the dreadfully distasteful flop of Cibola Burn, wasn’t enough to keep me engaged.

And yet, almost 10 years later, I find myself intrigued by the new series of the writing duo, enough to request The Mercy of Gods from NG. Corey writes well, with many years of honing skill to the point where it should by rights flow easily and seamlessly without major hitches. This aspect of The Mercy of Gods is executed decently for the most part – the writing is articulate and engaging, action scenes, when they happen, are dynamic and streamlined. But all the previous problems and all the criticisms I levelled at The Expanse are still very much applicable to the new series as well.

The story is fairly simple. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Ah, sorry, I seem to have confused my fairy tales for a moment. In the far future, in a galaxy far, far away, magically transported descendants of Earth humans engage in a surprisingly accurate reenactment of early 21st century academia life, replete with cliques, overblown almost-successes, severe administrative overhead, internal politicking and backstabbing. They speak like late-20th century/early 21st-century young academics, their problems and even their campuses are exactly the same… And it goes on, pages upon pages, until a sudden invasion of decidedly more pragmatic and powerful aliens (think big pharma/Elon Musk overtaking Yale by force) makes slaves out of them. They are taken to another research center where they have to compete with other research teams from different planets, and make their overlords happy. Backstabbing gets elevated to another level, a physical one that requires our team of misfit scientists to divert their research resources to create weapons and medicine. Of course, they succeed splendidly, all the while hating on Musk, erm, sorry, Carrix, who are prone to exposition-heavy prologues. Yea, that’s basically it. Ah, would’ve forgotten, because this particular twist plays such a minuscule role in this first installment, though it still might play a bigger role later on – there is also a sworn enemy of Carryx, a nano-swarm Thing-like …thing inhabiting bodies of other living beings and subsuming their personality and memories and wearing them like puppets. I guess that’s the SF part, since the rest reads like a thinly veiled satire on modern academia.

[...]

I received a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks.

My new all time favourite scifi book. I was hooked from beginning to end, audibly gasping, physically cringing, waving my hands around, covering my eyes and riding the best adrenaline rush.

This kept me up multiple nights in a row. I have zero regrets about the exhaustion for the morning after.

I've said before that this is like a depressing scifi love island, and I think I still stand by that. The group dynamics and interpersonal drama is juicy, tantalising and completely riveting. The horrible, traumatic situations that they're put in only manage to heighten the stakes.

This is very much a hard scifi, it goes heavy on the science. At times it feels like a thought experiment on anthropology and alien life. I loved every second of it.

It feels like they've applied everything they learnt from The Expanse, and crammed it all in in book one. Complex characters, politics, science, aliens, everything I ever wanted.

I'll literally be begging the authors to sell signed copies. I CANNOT WAIT for the next book.

HIGHLY recommend.

DAMN this was insane and made me feel things.

The plot sees Dafyd and his friends kidnapped by an alien race and transported to another world, where they're forced to prove themselves 'useful' or suffer the nasty consequences.

I don't want to talk too much about the plot, because I really enjoyed how completely unpredictable it was so I'd hate to spoil that for someone else. But, safe to say, this particular alien race is quite a nasty foe.

So much of how I felt reading this book relates to the contemplations of humanity, and how humans would feel and adapt to such situations. I think that's something Corey does well - they can plant the story in a completely foreign setting surrounded by completely foreign creatures and entities, and you still end up mulling over humanity with all of its strengths and weaknesses.

The characters portrayed those ideas brilliantly; even though I didn't like Dafyd at all, his behaviours made this story so much stronger. I loved reading the different reactions and thought processes, and while I sometimes didn't agree with what a character was doing or thinking, I easily understood it.

This story takes a lot of care to develop its characters, but its never dull. There's always action just around the corner, and it's hard to catch a breath before the next twist knocks you for six. As mentioned, I loved how wildly unpredictable it was.

Such a brilliant, fascinating read, that touched some very deep emotions within me. Easily one of my favourites this year, and I can't wait for the next installment!

With thanks to NetGalley for a digital ARC

Having read The Expanse series and absolutely loved it and given most of the books in it 5-stars, I was a little hesitant about how much I would be able to avoid comparisons. However other than a superficial similarity Mercy of the Gods is quite different and is also a 5-star read.

Possibly the only real similarity is that this centres on a small cutting edge group of scientific researchers who have been removed from their home world by the Carryx, a race alien in every way possible, and taken to a Carryx world. Their circumstances force them to become tight-knit in much the same way as circumstances forced the crew of the Rocinante together.

The storyline itself is linear. It begins with introducing the team members and their dynamics on their home world, and progresses through their capitivity on an alien world. Other than occasional insights from aliens, all the POVs are from this team and in a single timeline so it is easy to keep up. There is some character development along the way, and although I haven't yet bonded with anyone from this team, I do like certain characters who I think will keep developing. I also keep reminding myself that this is only Book 1 of a trilogy.

I'm not going into detail about how the team deal with life in captivity with captors who are unreadable, unpredictable and who do not view humans as anything other than a potential commodity that must earn its keep because that is part of the story itself and very well done. I was drawn in from the`first two pages and and remained engrossed to the last page. I very much like where Book 1 left off and the direction the series is taking.

The wait for Book 2 is going to be excruciating.

In a word, disappointing. I have tried to minimize spoilers and avoid discussing plot beats beyond a general sense.

When I think of my time with this novel, I keep coming back back to the first few pages. There's a certain gift to being able to name fictional entities, and it's immediately clear that the Corey team just... doesn't have it -- Carryx, Ejia, the Kursk submarine disaster. My sense of disbelief recoiled from the page like there was a fucking tarantula there, and that's without the Generic Bad Guy Expository Epigraph that opens the novel. Leviathan Wakes was a great beginning to a series that, while I'm critical of, did a lot of things well and engrosses me on a re-read. The Mercy of Gods is a novel that I struggled to avoid putting down at the 10% mark. My interest started to get hooked at the 40% mark, but I wasn't quite enjoying it. The first time my brain went, "Oh, this is cool," was at the 70-75% mark, and the last quarter or so which generally held my attention didn't leave me feeling it justified what came before.

Basically, based on the blurb, the last quarter of this novel is what I thought the story was going to be. What this novel is, however, is an extended prologue to a series that is obviously intended to stretch out for many novels.

I'm not a hater. I've read The Expanse series three times, excluding the final novel. I followed the Corey writing Patreon. I love the TV series. I'm more realistic about the strengths and weaknesses of the series that most, but don't regret reading the books. I really didn't want to dislike this novel. So, I don't like saying: The Mercy of Gods is the weaknesses of the Corey team with few of the strengths and, sadly, I think makes an admirable case that the exemplary parts of The Expanse owed a significant debt to the work of the people who played a part in the online play-by-post game that formed the backbone of Leviathan Wakes, and so the wider series.

One thing that's immediately obvious about Mercy is how much it feels like it's trying to be trendy. It's got the science-focused "that's the power of math" protagonists reminiscent of The Martian, it's got characters who despite being from the distant, time-swept planet of Pilot, speak and act and exist in a milieu that might as well be contemporary Earth, it's doing the everyman becomes a total badass like Red Rising or Name of the Wind, the trials and intrigue of any YA novel made after Hunger Games, Humans Are Special of so much sci-fi from Babylon 5 to Mass Effect, it even feels like it draws on System Apocalypse novels.

One issue that stuck in my mind throughout my time with Mercy, was that they credited Frank Herbert. Both Mercy and Dune use epigraphs and quotes to tell the story, but Dune is remarkable for it and Mercy just feels cheap and generic. See, Dune tells us immediately off the bat that Paul is going to become Muad'dib and so strongly that Dune will be his home, not his actual homeworld of Caladan. In a novel with a prescient protagonist, this adds an interesting wrinkle to the drama, and a bit of pathos to Paul's attempt to escape it, especially as we learn who Muad'dib is -- but Paul can't, and he won't.

Meanwhile, Mercy opens with a much longer statement that tells us the Carryx are great because they beat-up a bunch of other alien species the authors made up, and basically tells us that Dafyd is a major, major, major badass. Not how or why, just that he is. It's almost parodic in how Ekur-Tkalal tells it: "If we had left it alone, nothing that came after would have been as it was... I would not now be telling you the chronicle of our failure." Wow, the bad guys lose... to the protagonist, who is secretly a badass? I can't wait to see how Dafyd goes on this journey that surely will be told in this whole novel?

The epigraph is also frustrating because it reveals the Coreys know what the story is about, yet take forever getting there -- and honestly, don't. After a promise of sci-fi invasions and invading aliens and a fight to survive the slavery of his world, we open the novel with university drama that feels like it's set somewhere on Earth circa 2020~ rather than a distant world that's so far removed from Earth, humanity has no idea how they got there. They have Gothic architecture, they talk like you and I, they drink beer, eat beef, and smoke marijuana, know the smell of licorice, and Dafyd's name is the Welsh form of David. The fact that the chapters contain segments that feel like the Coreys are begging you to keep reading, the fun stuff is coming soon, seriously, there'll be a storm that burns a thousand worlds, please, we'll get there, don't close the book... Like, start with the good stuff, Coreys. You did it in Leviathan Wakes! Can you imagine if it took six chapters of slice-of-life for us to learn about the Scopuli? If we were only hitting the inciting incident promised by the blurb a full twenty percent into the novel? If it took about sixty percent of the novel to feel like a plot was beginning to cohere?

Following up The Expanse would always be a tough task, but The Mercy of Gods is painfully aware that its authors wrote The Expanse. Honestly, I think doing another space opera after nine books of it was a mistake. I think doing another space opera that other reviewers wonder if it's not a stealth sequel to The Expanse was a major mistake. But it's the little things that get stuck in my literary teeth, that even the first few chapters are riddled with ultimately mundane profundities. I like to call them Coreyisms. Y'know, things like "Small moments, unnoticed at the time, change the fate of empires" or how children don't understand things adults forget. There's even a dream sequence very early on. A lot of this stuff was making me grit my teeth by the end of The Expanse because it'd so clearly become an authorial tic, and here it is again. Hell, I sighed and skimmed past Yet Another Female Character Needing To Pee And Then Peeing.

There was a wonderfully vivid simplicity to the Expanse's worldbuilding. Jim Holden and the Rocinante. Amos Burton the big, bald mechanic. The OPA. Protogen and the protomolecule. Mercy of the Gods gives us the Carryx who not only commit the elementary sin of "the bad guy species has an evil sounding name" but also that they're just, like, Space Darwinists with a slice of Borg and a dose of "if you kill me, you become me, so I win." An archetype that's very hard to make interesting and, again, the fact their philosophy is delivered via an expository statement between chapters is not exactly invigorating stuff. That said, some of the bits of the novel that caught my interest did feature them, but they were few and far between.

The Expanse was also very sleek in its delivery of exposition, which always surprises me when I read it. It doesn't feel like you're being info-dumped or simply told things, it all feels very natural to the characters and the story. The exposition in Mercy is clunky and disruptive: to be blunt, unless it immediately relates to the characters, I don't give a shit about the Rak-hund or the Sinen or whatever else. There are a few interesting thoughts and ideas, but not enough to salvage the remaining paragraphs that surround them.

(Why does the scene where Nol and Synnia hear the voice of the Carryx feel like the beginning of a LitRPG novel? You're tending the garden when a mysterious voice tells you that you have been measured and your place determined... There's this unsettling feeling of Mercy of Gods trying to capture a sort of sort-of younger sci-fantasy audience in a way that's less art and more product. The sort of book where people will compare Dafyd to Kvothe or the guy from Red Rising, y'know?)

The characters themselves are also rather indistinct. Leviathan Wakes rendered its cast in broad brush strokes, but that let you know who they were and gave you reference points. The initial group of university faculty all blur together, and it doesn't help that the story doesn't stick to Daffy, nor that the chapters don't indicate who we're following, nor that we perspective hop around before really getting to know anyone. It doesn't help that when their world of Pilot is being invaded and ending and coming face to face with bizarre aliens, they all feel very... flat. The Swarm is... fine, but feels reminiscent of a lot of the ideas in The Expanse (and sci-fi in general) and didn't really feel relevant until the last quarter or so. In my review of Tiamat's Wrath, I noted that it feels like the Coreys had read Blindsight just before writing it. The Mercy of Gods likewise contains elements that feel like inferior versions of Watts' novel: the grid heralding first contact, the power of holding two conflicting ideas at once...

I don't want to talk much about the plot for fear of spoilers. Suffice to say, it isn't really what you expect based on the blurb, and is much too slow. It doesn't feel like a story about a distant human world being invaded by an enslaving hive, and more like contemporary university people being abducted. It all feels very artificial, and it has that contemporary sf/f trilogy sense of very little happening until the end of the novel. The angst between Dafyd and Else felt hollow, as did the dramatic ending statements. The end of the novel just made me shrug because this is so clearly an incomplete story. There's a very obvious comparison to The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which is also a 'part 1' story, but ends on such a wickedly strong note that it feels like it is complete -- for now.

I don't know. I got this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review, and here it is. I wanted to like this novel much more than I did, and I'm sure a lot of people will, but this is a pretty disappointing start to a series that I can't imagine continuing with. It feels like a combination of all the hot trends in SF/F in an unwieldy pastiche that weakens its core concept by trying to work in all those trends. If I wasn't brutally determined to see this out to the end, I would've put it down before the 50% mark for quite some time and probably not picked it up again.

I will admit to a little trepidation when I saw this was coming. I'm a major fan of The Expanse series; there's always that mix of excitement for new work from a favourite author (combo, in this case), and worry that new work will not compare to the old. What if the first stuff was a result of thinking and planning for their whole life, and now they are doing stuff with less preparation?

Happily, my fears were completely and utterly unfounded. This book is wildly imaginative, the characters are flawed and complex and compelling, and I am already psyched for the next one. Which is probably in at least a year, so that's going to be so very frustrating.

Humans live on Anjiin. They haven't always been there, but they have no history to explain how or why or even really when they arrived. But they're doing very well in terms of arts and sciences and general life standards. They have a highly structured society, which isn't great for everyone, but people deal with it as people always do. Dafyd works in a team that has recently made a major breakthrough: they have figured out a key step in integrating the two sets of biology on Anjiin. Because this is the clue as to humanity not being indigenous to Anjiin: there is the biology that seems related to humanity, and there is... everything else. And ne'er the twain shall meet. Until now.

At this point, it seems like the story will be about science and scientific rivalry. Which is all well and good. But then something is spotted on the edge of the heliosphere, and it turns out to be aliens, who do dreadful things to Anjiin and then collect a bunch of humans and take them... somewhere else. At which point the story becomes something else entirely. There are a whole range of aliens under the dominance of the Carryx, and humans are now one of them; they have to figure out what that means, on a personal and collective level. There are (unsurprisingly) a range of responses - and it's in this that Corey shows a deep and compassionate understanding of humanity. I don't agree with all of the ways various characters respond - and I'm not meant to - but I do understand why they act like they do.

It's a first book in a series, so the ending is in no way a finale. It's absolutely a prologue to what's to come - indeed, the opening of the book, written by a Carryx, already says that Carryx interaction with humanity is going to have unexpected and catastrophic consequences. Exactly how will that happen? No idea! Need the rest of the series to figure that out!

🪳The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey🪳
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗

“What is, is.”

Thank you to and for the ARC and the opportunity to read and review the latest from the Sci Fi juggernaut that is James S.A. Corey.

If being offworld could feel like home… it would be this. From the moment I heard that a new Corey novel was on the horizon, I began counting the time by hours.

The first thing I noticed was that this is a marked step up in sentence and content quality over The Expanse, sentences are more poetic, themes are delivered far more elegantly and it has gained a depth of soul in the text itself that, while present in The Expanse, wasn’t nearly as comprehensive.

The beginning of this book is slow initially, and it really takes the time to breathe; introducing the cast of characters, their motivations and their relationships to each other. This part of a novel is usually my favourite, however, here I couldn’t be sure that any of what I was learning was important to the wider narrative so it felt a bit sluggish.

The narrative really kicks off at about 30% and from that point onwards it flew by in a haze of alien life, research drama, high stakes negotiation and exploration. This is a difficult book to read, with a lot of complex scientific research but when things start to unfold, when things are revealed this is jaw dropping.

That being said, this is a very claustrophobic beginning to a “space opera” it takes place in essentially one building of one planet, there are some great little interludes with alien perspective but it doesn’t feel as large a scale as I was expecting. However I feel that will not be the case in future instalments.

In stark contrast to the empty universe of The Expanse, The Captives War already features a large variety of thought out alien life, including our antagonists, The Carryx.

One thing I think this book absolutely NAILED to the wall was the way humanity reacted to the invading force and being captive. My favourite aspect of all invasion stories/commanding extraterrestrial forces is the attempt from humans to anthropomorphise and organism and its instinct. They are not human, they don’t act human, they don’t “think” human, they definitely do not feel human and it is terrifying.

You can’t negotiate with nature.

The Carryx are terrifying in their separation from empathy and adherence to strict structures of authority. There’s no way of ascribing any kind of human logic to the way they run their society, and any attempts to do so may be fatal.

The characterisation here is incredible, and I’m so excited to see how our mainstays and major players develop, especially with the golden track record Corey has for their character work.

I’m really excited to see where this trilogy goes, and I’m already excited for book two and this isn’t even fully out yet.

The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey is the first book I've ever read where I hated every single character and yet would immediately give the book a 5/5 rating. At times frustrating, at times going way over my head, this book is simply stunning. Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham once again somehow write a seamless book where you have no idea where one writer begins and the other ends. James S.A. Corey crafts the greatest possible follow up to the Expanse.

This book is intense, it's science-y, and its so well researched that unless you're knowledgeable in the right areas a lot of it is going to go over your head. For me I love watching an author weave the magic of their smarts into a story and not just infodump, but make it work. It's generally Sci-Fi stories like this that I read on rare occassions because it's just so clever that you can't possibly read only this style of book. You need a breather between.

But, beneath the science there is a story that you just can't put down. It's human and personal and although I despised each character individually I constantly found myself gripped by their struggles and fist-pumping their victories no matter how small. It's hard not to root for the humans when faced with unnatural, despicable aliens.

This is the opening stanza of the captive's war and through tumultuous events it's really only the very beginning of a huge conflict. The lore we have been exposed to is a drop in the barrel. I cannot wait to see what happens to these poor, fighting humans and to find out why. Why so many things? But most of all, why can't I binge this trilogy all right now?

The Mercy of Gods was my #1 most anticipated Sci-Fi release of 2024 and it has absolutely blown me out of the water. I already decided on my favourite reads of the year so far and this has just thrown a spanner into the works. I need to let it sit for a little while, but it could just steal the number 1 spot.

*Spoilers Abound*

There’s a scene which will always stay with me in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time where a human is imprisoned by the spider society. Despite efforts from the human to communicate, the spiders can’t comprehend that sounds can be communication, and dismiss the human as a dumb beast. The human is left to waste away in imprisonment; the gap between the two sentient species is left unbridged. This scene chilled me to my core, and this new book from James S.A Corey (Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham) takes a similar idea and expands it to series size: human captured and treated as mere ‘animals’ by aliens whose motivations and culture are almost impossible to comprehend.

In The Expanse, Abraham and Frank proved they were masters of building from small, personal stories to solar-system-spanning epics and, in this novel, they take that expertise and raise the stakes. This is galaxy-spanning story told through the eyes of lost and lonely characters as they deal with the fact that not only is humanity not alone in the universe, but they are also so far down the food chain that they could be extinguished in an instant. The book moves slowly for the first few chapters, and then accelerates through the existential crisis of an overwhelming alien threat.

The novel exudes in raw humanity, as characters confront their place in the universe and come to terms with the fact that their sentience is not so unique. Characters fight and scream their way through the discovery that they are like fleas in the eyes of their new masters: occasionally annoying and easily squished. There’s plenty of mystery to keep things engaging, as we follow along with the main characters as they try and work out what has happened to them and to discover what the aliens want from them. In typical fashion, Frank and Abraham use a large cast of characters, delving into diverse perspectives and experiences. My biggest issue was probably with Dafyd, ostensibly the main character and alleged hero of humanity, who didn’t seem like he had much to do in this book. However, there’s an excellent setup for him to be significant in the rest of the series.

I especially enjoyed some of the philosophy in the book, as characters muse on humanity’s ability to ruthlessly destroy other species only to yell ‘unfair’ when the tables are turned on them. There are some dark moments, as the novel deals with genocide and indiscriminate murder, and it’s probably good that the authors set this on an alternate world to keep the focus on the fictional story rather than real history. The connections are there, however, and some readers may find this confronting, especially when combined with the surprisingly intense violence. I found the book to drag little in the middle chapters, and there’s some self-awareness from the characters over this as they twiddle their thumbs waiting for something to happen. It’s a minor point however, and the plot moves faster at the end. All the hallmarks we loved from The Expanse are here, yet this is a distinctly new space-opera universe, and I consumed every word of it.

The Mercy of Gods was an absolute blast of a read, and is currently sitting as one of my favourite reads of 2024. This was my first introduction to James S.A Corey, and after reading this I cannot wait to read their Expanse series and any other works they release in the future. I flew through this book in under two days, and would recommend this to anyone that is looking for a new sci-fi read, particularly those who are fans of The Three Body Problem.

One of the best aspects of the novel for me were the array of interesting and engaging characters. The multiple POVs were a great way to experience the story, and I particularly found Dayfs to be a compelling protagonist, and someone I am eager to follow in future instalments. I also thought the entries from the Carryx librarian were fascinating and I loved the way that these interludes foreshadowed what was to come.

The novel also did a fantastic job of maintaining tension throughout the entirety of the novel. Even before the Carryx were introduced, there was a sense of imminent catastrophe which continued throughout the whole novel.. James S.A Corey masterfully conveyed the dangers of extraterrestrial life for humanity. The unrelenting tension was also due to the fact that I was deeply connected to the characters and their journey, and I felt every loss and victory that they suffered.

Overall, I would say this is a fantastic entry into the sci-fi genre, and I cannot wait to see where the series goes. This was easily one of my favourite novels for 2024, and I am definitely going to check out the other novels by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for an action packed thrill ride that will keep you reading late into the night.

I would like to thank Hachette Australia and NetGalley for providing me with this ARC.