It hasn’t even been three years since James S.A. Corey—also known as Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—published Leviathan Falls, the final novel of the Expanse. It feels longer, somehow. But three years is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to wait for the followup. The Mercy of Gods arrives as the first of a trilogy, and it also arrives with enough stellar worldbuilding, moral complexity, and high-stakes human drama to make a person wish this series would be nine books long as well.
The details of humanity’s arrival on the planet Anjiin are “lost in the fog of time and history,” but for a while there, they had a good run. At the start of The Mercy of Gods, Anjiin’s humans have just achieved a remarkable scientific breakthrough: Tonner Freis and his scientific workgroup have figured out how to translate between the planet’s two “trees of life”—the imported species that came along with humans, and the native biome. The book opens on their celebration, which is shortly overshadowed by complex academic politics. But academic power grabs mean nothing once the Carryx show up.
Humans are simply not up to the task of resisting these technologically advanced, galaxy-dominating species, who surround the planet, instantly kill one-eighth of the population, and then take the highest status people—composers, politicians, and, yes, successful scientists—off to an alien world dotted with massive ziggurats in which countless species struggle to earn the right to survive. If the humans can complete an assigned task, they will prove themselves useful to the Carryx, and earn a place in the “moieties.” If not, well, then they have no use. “Usefulness,” their first keeper tells them, “is survival.”
The first quarter of this book covers a brief period of normality, the tense invasion, and the miserable, traumatizing transit to the Carryx planet. It’s plenty of time for the authors to introduce the central players and demonstrate their personalities, from Tonner’s dedication to the work and desire for recognition to Jessyn’s struggle with her mental health to the perpetual observational standpoint of Dafyd Alkor, the team’s research assistant. The point-of-view skips around, but Dafyd stays central, and the book makes it clear from the start that he’s the character on whom this story pivots. The first pages are part of a statement from Ekur-Tkalal, “keeper-librarian of the human moiety of the Carryx,” who tells the reader two things the characters don’t know: One, the Carryx empire is going to fall. And two, humanity, and specifically Dafyd, will be the catalyst of that fall. “We did not see the adversary for what he was, and we brought him into our home.”
Buy the Book
The Mercy of Gods
This knowledge is necessary; it’s a beacon of hope that glows no matter how dark and heavy and distressing the novel gets. It lets us read with a vivid curiosity alongside the horror: How, how could humanity, with our fragile little bodies and insufficient tech, square off against an alien species that has subjugated dozens upon dozens of other worlds? But the aliens are not all-knowing. They understand, for example, that humans take showers and use toilets, but they don’t understand the need for pen and paper. They don’t think like humans; none of the other species do. The alien, here, is deeply alien—but it’s also alarmingly familiar. At the start of part two, Ekur-Tkalal says, “When a primitive of your own kind cut a branch from a tree and carved the wood into a tool … The tree had no power to stop you, and so it became a tool in your hand. What you did with a tree branch, we did with you and countless others before you.”
How is this different from what humans do? is a question the authors pose more than once. As the Carryx invasion begins, a couple is gardening; one of them thinks about how weeding is killing the plants that don’t suit. It isn’t a subtle comparison, but it is written into an ultimately heartbreaking scene with practical grace.
Everything, here, is a question of thinking, of how aliens think, how different humans think, and the different ways minds work, and adapt, and deal with trauma. Dafyd says a lot of telling things at the start, and one of them is about a person’s “pathological move,” which he defines as “the thing people do when they’re working on instinct.” Dafyd’s is, essentially, to try to understand. “I put myself in the other person’s place,” he says. “I think, What would I do if I were them? Or If I was doing what they did, why would I be doing it?”
In trying to understand, Dafyd asks a lot of necessary questions, like: Why are the Carryx doing what they do? What do they really want? What are the other species doing? What might the humans do to change or improve their future? What actions will they take in order to survive? What actions might doom them?
This novel is incredibly tense; the clock ticks, incessantly, on the do-or-die science project, and the authors efficiently illustrate each character’s stress response—and branch out beyond the humans. Several chapters give us the Carryx viewpoint, including a different facet of their massive war. From time to time, a different voice appears: The swarm, another alien whose species has been at war with the Carryx for ages. The swarm acts in its own alien manner, and serves as a powerful reminder that close proximity to someone or something vastly different has the power to change both parties, right down to their ways of thinking and feeling.
At times, The Mercy of Gods reminds me intensely of the best parts of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica, another story of survival and compromise. Both ask profoundly difficult questions about what positions a person might compromise on, what sacrifices they might make and what freedoms they might give up, when a whole species’ survival is on the line—and both demonstrate how some people will always default to manipulation, self-serving choices, and destructive pathological moves. There are no easy answers; heroics rarely accomplish much. But there are, sometimes, moments of beauty, pleasure, and connection.
This book, this series, is not the Expanse, but those who love that series should feel at home here. Franck and Abraham are old hands at switching perspectives, at writing the connections and conflicts of an ensemble cast that will also probably wind up flung across the stars. What makes this book—and the Expanse series—work so beautifully is, in part, a finely honed sense of balance, of facing horrors without reveling in them, and in pausing to appreciate those small moments of peace and connection when they come. From the very beginning, this book tells you that those little moments matter, and often more than you expect: “Small moments, unnoticed at the time, change the fate of empires.”
The fate of this empire seems hardly to have changed by the end of The Mercy of Gods. But I have a feeling we’ll look back at some small moments and recognize the beginning of its end.
The Mercy of Gods is published by Orbit.
