Blurb:

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Expanse comes a spectacular new space opera that sees humanity fighting for its survival in a war as old as the universe itself.

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.

Review:

Sometimes, with larger series, they are better viewed as the sum of their parts, where the enjoyment of each individual book may vary, but at story’s end, the ride was worth it. When the writing duo of James S.A. Corey completed The Expanse, I felt myself a bit wanting, a little disappointed at series’ end, but at the same time, I remembered that on individual arc levels, where the stories were contained and tightly-knit, they could really nail it. When their new trilogy, The Captive’s War, was announced, I was excited for a return to a smaller form than a large, sweeping space opera. But although the first book in this new trilogy, The Mercy of Gods, lands the setup very well, it was the execution that, once again, ultimately left me wanting more.

Millennia in the future, humanity has come to settle on the planet of Anjiin. On the cusp of a breakthrough with his team, research assistant Dafyd Alkhor enjoys his work with a brilliant scientific mind while navigating both the academic world and burgeoning romances within his team. But, everything changes when the Carryx descend upon Anjiin, killing one-sixth of the human population and taking the rest to serve on their homeworld. As survivors of the attack, Dafyd and his team are placed in a competition beyond their comprehension, to prove their worth to the Carryx against other captive species, else they themselves will face extinction. But survival is more than just a zero-sum game—sometimes, it means understanding your captors if you aim to defeat them.

The Mercy of Gods has an electric beginning, with a simple setup that allows the inciting events to hit all the harder. Dafyd and his team are not battle-hardened soldiers or cunning diplomats; all they are, is just regular people, researchers trying to get their grant funding through when the entire world goes to hell. The Carryx invasion at the end of the first part of the book is both horrifying and exhilarating, a pulse-pounding page turner that shows the helplessness one must feel when faced with no power to stop an authoritarian regime.

And the Carryx, though largely faceless to the reader, still make for a very compelling enemy. They care not for uprisings or justifications, and they will stop at nothing to subjugate their captives. There are many moments where their presence brings with it an overwhelming sense of tension and dread, that one false move will result in someone being brutally killed as a message to those who would try to follow in their wake.

So the setup is there, and the enemy works on many levels—but just what went wrong?

For me, it’s in the execution of much of what follows the Carryx invasion that The Mercy of Gods started to lose me. From this point, we follow Dafyd and his team as they are forced into a research project to prove humanity is worth more than the other species that were taken captive, and this project involves making one alien organism nutritionally compatible with another. Thematically, this fits with Dafyd’s team as they are researchers to begin with, but what follows from this point tended to drag far too much for my liking. In contrast to the bloody opening, we instead are mostly treated to long sections on the research and the scientific method behind it all, or a love triangle that ultimately doesn’t end up amounting to anything or going anywhere with very brief moments of shock interspersed.

Ultimately, it’s a story of survival and how humanity would adapt to being taken en masse by a hostile alien species. The struggles to adapt to it all are done well enough, but I felt that once the “competition” began, what should have felt like a desperate struggle instead amounted to the train grinding to a halt.

That said, it sets up the rest of the series well, and it does stick the landing after plodding along for a bit too long beforehand. More than anything, this comes across as a foundational novel that will plant the seeds for bigger things to come, and for that much, it’s still kept my interest for at least one more book.

At the end of the day, The Mercy of Gods did disappoint me a bit, but not so that it’s lost me forever. Corey’s strengths are present, with a rich world even more impressive than The Expanse and some strong setup for the rest of the series. It works as a teaser for what will come next, but on its own, it simply does not stand as tall as Corey’s best works in The Expanse. At least, not yet. When we know the sum of its parts, perhaps I’ll feel differently on this one.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna make sure the bugs in my crawl space aren’t planning a galactic conquest somewhere.