The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War, #1)
James S.A. Corey
How humanity came to the planet called Anjiin is lost in the fog of history, but that history is about to end. The Carryx—part empire, part hive—have waged wars of conquest for centuries, destroying or enslaving species across the galaxy. Now, they are facing a great and deathless enemy. The key to their survival may rest with the humans of Anjiin. Caught up in academic intrigue and affairs of the heart, Dafyd Alkhor is pleased just to be an assistant to a brilliant scientist and his celebrated research team. Then the Carryx ships descend, decimating the human population and taking the best and brightest of Anjiin society away to serve on the Carryx homeworld, and Dafyd is swept along with them. They are dropped in the middle of a struggle they barely understand, set in a competition against the other captive species with extinction as the price of failure. Only Dafyd and a handful of his companions see past the Darwinian contest to the deeper game that they must play to survive: learning to understand—and manipulate—the Carryx themselves. With a noble but suicidal human rebellion on one hand and strange and murderous enemies on the other, the team pays a terrible price to become the trusted servants of their new rulers. Dafyd Alkhor is a simple man swept up in events that are beyond his control and more vast than his imagination. He will become the champion of humanity and its betrayer, the most hated man in history and the guardian of his people. This is where his story begins.
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I feel like the writers set out to do something completely Not the Expanse. Whereas in The Exapnse it was more about the humans exploring a dead past civilization with the protomolecule, this is about the human reaction to being utterly consumed by a force that is beyond our understanding. It's more akin to the Three Body Problem than The Expanse. The antagonists are not evil. They just are. They have a phrase "what is, is" and that describes them perfectly. Readers might make mistakes with this. Don't look at the antagonists like humans. And that's where I enjoyed this so much, because it took sci-fi from the perspective of not trying to explain something that is completely alien and then dumb it down to human morality. It's about humans trying to understand the incomprehensible. I'm looking forward to the next book, as long as it succeeds in getting published, cause I know the reviews on thsi were mixed.
0I wish I loved this more, but it was a lackluster start to a series that I think has a lot of promise and may build up to bigger and better things as we get more books.
The main issue I had with The Mercy of Gods is the pacing in the middle of the book - it slowed down incredibly, and I was very bored as a result. The thought experiment happening here is interesting, but not even alien overlords forcing humans to prove that they're worth staying alive can't overcome the sheer boredom of watching them do research and think about research and think about how they're doing their research.
The writing is great, which is what I expected from them, and the sheer alien-ness of the aliens and their world was great as well. Like I said, the bones of a very interesting story is here, this felt very much like a prologue. I'm still going to continue on because I'm intrigued to see where it goes.
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