#The Mercy of Gods

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #52 – The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey

Introduction

I have never technically read any of Corey’s work before, but I really loved all the seasons of the Expanse I’ve seen. So, as it would be months and months before I could actually get a copy from the library, this is the rare book I actually bought off the strength of the blurb. Even rarer, this actually worked out! This is genuinely quite good, meaty, even fairly original space opera!

On the world of Anjiin, a human civilization has developed from the ruins of some prehistoric colonization mission that ended in atomic fire, their origins a matter of theology and myth. Through blatant nepotism (his aunt is a very important administrator whose made his career her way of honoring her dead sister), Dafyd Alkhor is a research assistant on the most prestigious and celebrated lab/project on the planet – a successful attempt to bridge the gap between the native plant life of the planet and the earth-descended life humanity brought with it. But even as everyone’s enjoying their moment in the limelight, the project is in danger of being split up, the credit and prestige a juicy enough prize for the academic politics to get vicious. And then there’s Dafyd’s rather poorly hidden crush on Else, a much more senior scientist and also the Team Lead’s girlfriend. Everything begins to come to a head, and then-

Well, and then aliens invade. The Carryx and their servitor-species more-or-less effortlessly destroy every human attempt to resist, and then execute one eighth of the population where they stand. Like some massive, chitinous, latter-day Assyrian Empire, they then sort through and abduct a few hundreds or thousands of humanity’s administrative and intellectual elites. Hostages to bring to one of their world-palaces to live at their pleasure and prove their worth as subjects until a place in imperial society can be decided for them – with ‘mass grave’ being an entirely plausibly option if they fail to please. Dafyd, honestly a pretty shit scientist but a natural courtier and schemer, then finds himself desperately trying to understand the Carryx actually want from humanity, and why they refuse to communicate any of it.

Complicity and Collaboration

So this is overwhelmingly a novel about how to react to subjugation – of different emotional and trauma responses to seeing your loved ones killed to make a point, to seeing everything you know destroyed in the space of an afternoon, to being forced into an overcrowded ship and sent to a terrifying new world where your life is valued exactly in proportion to your captors' whims. As the novel reaches its climax, it becomes increasingly about the morality of fawning, servile collaboration and nobly suicidal resistance – of whether it’s better to live kneeling or die standing, essentially.

This is one of very few books I can ever remember reading that make a big dramatic point of that question, and then come down on the side of ‘live kneeling, bide your time until you’ve earned their trust and know enough to stab the knife somewhere vital’. Partially just because every other genre story in the world does stack the deck towards resistance (making victory an almost foregone conclusion if people just have the courage to fight) and this does in the opposite direction (‘resistance’ would be at best a few spectacular terrorist attacks before they’re all hunted down and executed, the first thing the rest of humanity would know of their noble fight is when the retaliatory genocide starts), but still.

I found the start of chapter epigraphs a greater flaw, honestly – they’re quotations from an imprisoned Carryx after some future fall of the empire, who lays the blame squarely on humanity. I’m sure this is building up to some lovely dramatic irony in future books (and is a fun window to Carryx state ideology), but the constant reassurance that the plan works and isn’t just a rationalization for surrender really does drain some of the moral stakes out of the question, you know? From a dilemma with genuinely unclear outcome to just a particularly cruel and slimy trolley problem. Which I mean, still juicy character drama! I did enjoy it.

As Space Opera

There are many works of SFF which are, frankly, setting bibles with an excuse of a story stapled on out of obligation. This isn’t one of them, but it is a book written by people who clearly enjoyed the worldbuilding for its own sake and were always looking for little excuses to show off a bit of it. This is probably clearest with Anjiin – from a plotting perspective, they could have sketched out the basics of the world in a paragraph, assuming they didn’t just use some vague future Earth or Mars instead. But Anjiin actually feels like a fully realized world with its own politics and hypocrisies, its own culture and theology, and (especially) its own beautiful and profoundly alien landscapes and architectures. The last thing makes the book’s job much harder, really – the sense of shock and alienation (as well as a guilty sort of curious wonder) at the Carryx world-palace is vital to the book, making the home the cast is stolen away from so strange and unfamiliar as well can only make it harder to evoke in the reader.

The book spends something like the first fifty pages on Anjiin before the Carryx arrive – before (almost) anyone have the slightest idea they exist – introducing the main cast and their dynamics, sketching out their daily lives, and grounding Anjiin a real, vibrant place that it’s possible to get properly attached to. Vitally, it’s not a world without conflict – Dafyd et al spend the entire time embroiled in high stakes academic intrigues and interpersonal dramas, of a kind that could easily sustain a book on their own. This was a big part of why the book worked so well for me, I think – the loss of Anjiin felt like a loss, the cutting off of possibilities I wanted to see play out, the execution of characters I enjoyed seeing on the page. Given how often these sorts of stories can (unintentionally or no) read ‘and then they were whisked from boring mundanity with dramatic fireworks accompanying them’, I’m glad the book spent the wordcount on it.

The Carryx needed to really overawe and impress, which I think the book mostly manages. Their society seems both plausible and viscerally alien. The book does a neat job of obscuring the exact border between their (weird and fascinating) biology and their obsessively eugenic imperial ideology, in a way that seems very fitting given that both the characters we spend any time with at all are middle/lower-middle ranking strategists and overseers in the imperial project.

This is very much an empire which starts with the iron fist and only bothers mentioning the existence of carrots after a new subject population is brutalized and terrified into full submission. Their ideology is a half-step short of pure power worship, and makes no excuses butchering and exterminating to make the world more convenient for them – none of them ever refer to other species as anything but ‘animals’. This isn’t an empire that tries to convert and persuade – but then, it’s not one that needs to.

The world-palace and assembled ranks of other species gathered in it does an excellent job of being genuinely awe-inspiring even for the characters who hate every solitary thing about it. One great advantage of written science fiction over more visual media is that there’s no real need to make your aliens humanoid or relatable-looking, and Corey takes full advantage of it to fill the prison camp with dozens of memorable, different species – absolute none of which could be played by an actor in makeup.

Of course, those aliens are mostly just set dressing – with the exception of one species of primates that humanity is placed into competition with that ends up in a mutually escalating and quite bloody vendetta – the only alien species represented by actual characters with names and points of view are the Carryx and the infiltration-swarm sent by their great enemy to get scooped up along with humanity and gather information about their inner workings. It does this by consuming and possessing one of the main cast, and the book has great fun keeping coy about who for half the book while still using it as a secondary Point of View. Even more than the Carryx, it does a good job of coming across as both genuinely alien (probably because it is an alien-ness in conversation with the humanity of the two hosts it has assimilated) while still being an incredibly compelling character.

Characterization

Dafyd has a habit/nervous tic of looking for people’s ‘pathological behavior’ – the habits and tendencies they default onto in situations of high stress or while they feel in danger or powerless. This is, then, the lens the book invites as far as its characters go. Every one one of them spends the vast majority of the book cycling from one trauma response to another, and each is probably mostly characterized by the way they respond and the things they fixate on as their world is destroyed and they reckon with their own powerlessness. Fixate on the research the Carryx want and at to try and pretend life is still recognizable, or get angrier and angrier and jump at the first chance to justify beating some other inmates to death to feel a bit of agency and control. Plot out a nobly suicidal strike back against your oppressors, or try desperately to understand what they want so you can manipulate them and ensure the survival of you and yours. Or just constantly make off-color and mostly unfunny jokes.

None of it is exactly subtle, but it all rings pretty true, and does a good job making (almost) every cast member compelling and memorable. It helps, I suppose, that we end up spending at least a chapter or two in the head of half the main human cast, and get plenty of careful observation or intimate conversation with the rest. I’m aware some people really despise this sort of POV-hopping in a story (especially when it’s mostly just different perspectives on the same broad events/circumstances) but personally I rather adore it when it’s done well and they each seem both plausible and distinct, which this book easily manages.

In Conversation with the Wider Genre

I am at this point a bit of of a connoisseur of the hyper-specific subgenre of ‘space opera/spec fic more generally deeply concerned imperialism, colonialism, the experience of subjugation, and the internal logics of complicity and collaboration’ – a shelf which its always great to add new works to. I don’t particularly think Mercy was written in direct response to or is actively commenting on any similar works, but it is fascinating to do a bit of a compare/contrast. Well, it is for me, anyway.

Compared to your Memory Called Empire’s and your Imperial Radch’s the most salient really thing is how uncomplicatedly awful the Carryx are. Not that the empires in those books ostensibly aren’t, but they’re simultaneously also cultured, elegant, rich – in a word, alluring. We spend as much or more time on the intricacies of Radachi tea ceremonies and soap operas as we do on their atrocities, and even that makes the messy brutality of imperialism far more foregrounded relative to the seductive beauty of salon poetry and monumental architecture than it is in Memory. Mercy, in contrast, mostly shows the awe-inspiring beauty of the Carryx world palaces through the windows of a prison-camp. It’s there – we even meet the subject-species who were enslaved instead of exterminated because they can architect such wonders – but only really incidentally. The glory of the Carryx is their vastness and their overwhelming might, all the elegance and beauty they have is the fruit of conquest – and more often than not, different subject-species are introduced with hints or notes of how much more they were, before they were crushed and carved into something the empire could use. (This is almost certainly related to the fact that the only point of view we get whose at all a native or wiling agent of the empire is very minor, and clearly a villain without much in the day of redeeming or morally interesting features).

The better comparison is really Exordia. Or maybe I’m only saying that because it’s the one I read this year, and thus the one whose interesting little complications are at least somewhat clear in my head. Better put, Mercy is exactly the story Clayton from Exordia thought he was in. In both the empire is both alien and undisguised in its malice (two things that are probably related, really), in both the empire doesn’t feel any need to understand or integrate humanity, when overwhelming superiority in technology, scale, and availability of coercive force allow it to just threaten and brutalize until it gets what it wants. The humans in Exordia are just both more and less lucky. Less, because their alien invaders are even more monomaniacally (indeed, metaphysically) malevolent to the point that even being their willing accomplice only buys hours to days of life. More, because they have an ancient relic of a plot device buried in the mountains to give a bit of cause for actual hope in violent resistance (and so a final act of the story concerned with an entirely different suite of messy trolley problems).

It’s an interesting addition to the subgenre anyway – I really can’t recall any other books that have a protagonist collaborating with the empire while not at any point being seduced by it. Well no, that’s a lie – Machinaries of Empire does hit the same beat, just in extraordinarily different ways.

Should Your Read This Book?

The answer is at least partially conditional on how the rest of the series turns out – the narrative absolutely requires sequels, and oh how they could retroactively absolutely ruin it. But with just the one book and a bit of optimism? If the premise seems even slightly intriguing, then absolutely.

[strid3rofthen0rth]

The vast majority of my reading is done on my Kindle via Libby. If I bought all the books I read, I'd have to build another barn.

Those are often first-time authors to me, or series I like fine enough, but don't adore. And most of the nonfiction.

The next tier up are books that I want to hold, but don't need to own. I'll go to the library and get a copy of the latest in a favorite series or author, so I can read a physical book. There's still no beating that.

Then you have the personal all-time greats. Fiction and nonfiction. If you're up here, you're purchased and displayed proudly, but it's hard to make that list. They don't let just anybody into the Hall of Fame.

So it's very rare for me to outright buy a book from a brand new series. But when it's from the author's of The Expanse, one of those proudly displayed with the highest veneration, it's a no brainer. I pre-ordered that shit so it got here as soon as possible. Counted the days.

I worked all day yesterday thinking about it, waiting for me on the side table next to the recliner. Excited for it.

And then they hit me with this?

Two of the all-time greats? The best evers to me? I'm choking up on the dedication page?

OK motherfuckers, I see how it's gonna be. Fantastic first hundred pages, by the way.

[gcantread]

new release goofin’ 🌻 | JOMP book photo challenge | 13 August 2024

[bookwyrminspiration]

i must confess every single one of the alien descriptions has gone over my head. I could not describe a single one to you. I don’t know what the fuck they’re on about

[yes-we-exist]

Help! My favourite character in The Mercy of Gods is a parasitic swarm that invades a human host, absorbs their memories, thoughts and feelings, killing them in the process, and then puppeteers the body until it’s ready to hop into the next host

[damn-daemon]

[rhetoricandlogic]

In ‘The Mercy of Gods,’ the Authors of ‘The Expanse’ Get Less Expansive

Like all good science fiction fans, Daniel Abraham enjoyed watching Andor. And Abraham knows what he’s talking about when it comes to high-quality sci-fi storytelling: Under the pseudonym James S.A. Corey, Abraham and Ty Franck cowrote the celebrated book series The Expanse and coproduced the television adaptation, which offered genre fans a captivating blend of space opera and political intrigue.

Nearly three years after The Expanse ended, both on-screen and on the page, the James S.A. Corey duo is out with the start of a new series: The Mercy of Gods, the first novel in a planned trilogy called The Captive’s War. This book, which hit shelves last week, is both a satisfying stand-alone read and an excellent setup for the series to come, even if it forecasts a rather different sort of story from The Expanse.

Asked about a key distinction between the two series, Abraham turns to the gritty Star Wars prequel to a prequel to make a point.

Andor excelled because “it felt authentic,” Abraham says. “It was the first time I can remember since the ’70s when I felt like the Empire was really something oppressive, not just guys in cool, dark suits emoting a lot. It was this sense of the danger of that kind of vast machine.”

There is perhaps no machine more oppressive, more dangerous, and more vast than the Carryx empire in The Mercy of Gods: a race of warlike aliens who are set on conquering the galaxy and can slaughter millions without strain, due to their military might and incomprehensibly advanced technology. Andor is an apt comparison, as this new series details the flickers of a burgeoning rebellion against overwhelming imperial odds. “It’s survivors versus authoritarians,” Franck says. “It is what happens to you when you are conquered by a militaristic authoritarian regime and you have to learn to live inside that regime.”

The Mercy of Gods starts on a human planet—not Earth—thousands of years in the future. Dafyd Alkhor is a research assistant in a biology lab, consumed by the petty desires and complications of any average human life: routine data collection, a workplace rivalry, a secret crush.

Then everything changes when the Carryx attack. They kill some humans and take others (including Dafyd) prisoner, transporting them back to their homeworld for a seemingly simple test: If the surviving humans can make themselves useful, they’ll live; if not, they’ll die, too.

The Captive’s War employs a narrower narrative lens than The Expanse, at least in the first book. Almost all of the focus in Mercy is on Dafyd and his lab partners—each of whom develops as a unique and relatable character, just as James Holden’s crew on the Rocinante flourish as both a collective unit and individual beings. But some of The Expanse’s other highlights, such as planet hopping and intricate politicking, are largely absent from the new novel.

This tightened focus extends to the series’ structure. While The Expanse spanned nine books, The Captive’s War will be three. “It’s not doing the same kind of genre skipping that The Expanse did, because The Expanse did its Western, it did its noir, it did its political thriller,” Abraham says. “The Captive’s War is really, in a way, a more cohesive story than The Expanse had the ability to be.”

(That’s the high-minded way to look at the difference, at least. Franck offers a simpler explanation, with a laugh: “We didn’t want to write nine books again.”)

The new novel suffers from the lack of political maneuvering; there’s no Chrisjen Avasarala or Winston Duarte analogue in Mercy. Its world can sometimes feel too small (though a development at the end of the book suggests an expansion—no pun intended—to come in the sequel).

Yet at other points, Mercy’s world-building makes its universe feel unknowably gigantic. In The Expanse (spoiler alert), the alien threats never actually appear; the authors thought they’d add more menace as looming, Lovecraftian specters. But in Mercy, aliens abound, as the human prisoners interact with and observe creatures of all shapes, sizes, and lifestyles.

Here, the authors utilize the delightful genre trick of implying a much larger world than is actually relevant to the plot. The human captives are housed in a massive pyramid where they encounter those multifarious species, but that’s merely the prison for “the other oxygen breathers,” Franck says. The humans also see other immense pyramids in the distance, which hold yet more aliens who live in sulfuric atmospheres, in water, and so on.

“The idea of this is to give that sense of vast scale,” Abraham says. “The idea is I want this to feel huge. I want this to feel complex.”

As is typical of a Corey novel, Mercy is also punctuated by moments of violence and humiliation and despair. The authors have always been able to turn darkness into page-turning thrills, and Mercy’s bleakest sections approach—if don’t ever quite reach—the worst protomolecule-induced horror that The Expanse ever presented.

But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. On the book’s very first page, a flash-forward reveals that the Carryx empire falls and that Dafyd is somehow responsible. This choice was made partly for tonal balance, to compensate for all that darkness. “If you didn’t have some ray of hope, this would be a brutal read,” Abraham says.

Even more, it creates a compelling mystery that will carry through the rest of the series. The Carryx empire seems omnipotent and completely unbothered by humanity. It doesn’t murder and enslave humans because of any hatred or rivalry; the humans are simply resources to be exploited. As one of the Carryx analogizes in the book, when a human cuts down a tree branch, “the tree had no power to stop you, and so it became a tool in your hand.”

But somehow, the human tool named Dafyd will take down an empire. What could be an early spoiler is, instead, the engine for the rest of the plot. Franck explains, “When a guy says, ‘Let me tell you about the first time I killed a crocodile,’ and then the scene opens with a guy being dropped naked into the middle of a crocodile pit, the question isn’t, Did he survive and kill a crocodile? The question is, How the fuck did a naked guy in a crocodile pit actually beat one of them?”

That setup is reminiscent, incidentally, of Andor: Everyone watching Cassian, Luthen Rael, and Mon Mothma struggle against the might of the Empire knows that, eventually, the underdog rebels will succeed in creating the sunrise that Luthen knows he’ll never see. But the tension and entertainment value come from learning how they reach that sunrise and how they endure all the dark nights they face along the way. 

The same looks to be true of The Mercy of Gods. With all of its alien surroundings, and without Earth and our familiar solar system as a backdrop, this new series doesn’t appear remotely as adaptable as The Expanse. It would be a surprise if Dafyd defeats the Carryx on television screens anytime soon.

But this story lives just as wonderfully on the page. “The first book is telling you all the reasons why [the Carryx empire] can’t fail: It’s too big, it’s too powerful,” Franck says. “So the tension is: What could this guy possibly have done to bring this about?”

[0xchloe]

Mercy of Gods - James S.A. Corey

Overall, 4.5/5.

Likes: Characters Narration Style Worldbuilding Queer representation Dislikes: One specific bit of motivation/characterization that fell flat to me

SPOILERS Well written, engaging introduction to a new trilogy. The world building was usually subtle enough that it didn't feel like an infodump, while still answering most of the questions I would have asked. Considering the main characters are being introduced to the Carryx and their culture at the same time as us, it provides a pretty natural flow of keeping us up to speed. The character interaction and interpersonal relationships felt well written, maybe better than the early Expanse books. The romance subplot between Else and Dafyd is mostly believable, and especially within the context of her "possession" by the Swarm. Speaking of which, the Swarm was a really interesting part of the novel. Maybe I didn't pick up on the clues (I know I missed at least one when I re-read it), but I was pretty surprised when Else was revealed to be the host of the swarm.

The conflicting motivations between the Swarm and the humans made for an interesting dynamic, even if the humans were mostly unaware. My major complaint is that it didn't really feel like the group planning a revolt had a whole lot of actual motivation. Obviously the "noble sacrifice" idea has a history and emotion behind it, but I was just too convinced that it would be a totally useless gesture. Dafyd thinks as much to himself, and it just seems like a logical conclusion.

Looking forward to the next one!

[snootsies]

So, I just finished reading The Mercy of Gods last night.

The latest novel by the authorial duo who co-write under the James S.A. Corey, the novel follows a band of variously dysfunctional researchers who - at the apex of their respective careers - are captured and brought into captivity by alien slavemasters. The novel is *great* at capturing the feelings of alienation and dread that the characters feel while they're dragged off to serve as a gear in the great Carryx empire.

The scope and tone of the story is a large departure from the duo's previous work with "The Expanse," though the trademark flair that the two authors bring to cataloguing the human experience of destitution and misery is absolutely on point. While there are a few hope spots sprinkled throughout the book, those are always positioned against the brutal reality that the cast find themselves thrown into.

The aliens, much more present than they ever were in "The Expanse", still feel incredibly alien to behold in comparison to the humans. Their mentality is interesting to probe - it doesn't seem like the sort of mentality that would eventually lead to a spacefaring species, leading one to wonder how they exactly reached their level of galactic imperial might. This will, hopefully, be further expanded upon by the next two books in the trilogy.

Without getting into spoiler territory, I absolutely loved the book and the only part that genuinely upset me was bingeing it last night and finally hitting the final page. The book ends right as things start getting interesting, but I suppose they do need to ship the middle novel of the trilogy somehow. :p

If you're a fan of "The Expanse" or of science fiction in general, I highly recommend the work. It's much less hard scifi than the last book, but this is understandable in that the humans are held captive by aliens many times their ken.

Go read it! :3

[gil-estel]

the mercy of gods is specially formulated for people whose brain chemistry was fundamentally altered by animorphs at a formative age

[itmightrain]

Love in a book when you're like okay this would be the most logical thing for this character to do next but that would make things wildly fucked up given everything else and idk if the writers are brave enough to make it that fucked up and then they do

[literary-illuminati]

Mercy of Gods has occasional interludes from the perspective of an alien infiltration-construct that basically ate and replaced the nervous system of a human in a way that leaves the boundaries of identity kind of porous and fuzzy.

This is mostly played for various strains of horror and rumination, but did just include the very funny note that the host considers a bit of a silver lining that she only cheated on her boyfriend and made out with the cute research assistant after she basically got possessed and then told to run actnormal.exe. Gets to enjoy it and entirely iron-clad excuse to not feel guilty!

[nzbookwyrm]

August 2024

[gcantread]

the experience of reading The Mercy of Gods on a plane trapped in a holding pattern over the turbulent Front Range while Every Kind Of Weather was visible in the distance at once sure was...something. flashes of lightning. misty veils of rain. single rays of light slicing through the dark clouds to illuminate a distant field of windmills. a double rainbow. and here's me reading my Aliens Book and eating my Tube Dinner

[yes-we-exist]

Lmfao the swarm took over a male host for the first time, decided it didn’t like it and immediately started to do hrt