Review: The World to Come by Yuval Kordov

Blurb:

The dramatic conclusion to the Hand of God trilogy.

Bless the Eternal One!

Or suffer her wrath. God-engines close in on the Union, pushing them back to the brink of savagery. A secret convoy heads north to get help from an old clan, but they have to cross Hell to get there.

The Hellmouth opens.

Spilling forth its legions. From west to east, no one is safe. But as civil war pits hammer against shield in Bastion, no one is watching.

“What are you going to do?”
“Rescue my daughter.”

Meanwhile, two unlikely companions race through it all to save their children from a war no one can win.

Who will usher in the World to Come?

--

For fans of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, Iain Banks’ Culture novels, Dune, and other classic metaphysical science fiction.

Review:

On the recent press tour for Furiosa, director George Miller repeated this little phrase that has stuck with me ever since I heard it. He made little variations to it every time he said it, so to paraphrase: 

Just because these characters exist in an ugly world, that doesn’t mean they stop making beautiful things. 

And I kept thinking about this quote as I read Yuval Kordov’s The World to Come. But more on why later…

I was and still am thrilled, shocked, and delighted to have been given the opportunity to read this novel in advance of its formal release. I have been a huge fan of these novels since I first discovered them around this exact time one year ago, and I’m grateful for the trust Yuval Kordov has placed in me with the advance sharing of his work. And HOLY SMOKES, folks; WHAT A BOOK. There is so much here to talk about narratively, as well as aesthetically and thematically; but I will do my best to keep this review as spoiler free as possible, so as to coax you into reading not just this book but all three books in the trilogy with as clean a mental slate as possible.

For brief but necessary context, I came across book 1 of the Dark Legacies series—the stellar The Hand of God—because it was part of the 3rd annual Self Published Science Fiction Competition (colloquially, SPSFC3), to which I had also submitted a novel; and since I wanted to be a supportive team player amongst my fellow indie authors, in the first week that the whole list of competitors was made available, I scrolled through the covers and picked out a dozen or so that I wanted to explore for myself before the judging began (my first review for SFF Insiders, of Kizuna, was another such SPSFC3 entrant). But The Hand of God was at the top of my list. The blurb, the cover, the vibe, it all just screamed, “Jake, read this book!” (and as a fellow LEGO enthusiast how could I not fall in love with a trilogy of books that so audaciously feature LEGO mechs on their covers?).

To plagiarize myself from my 2023 Goodreads review, it boggled my mind that The Hand of God was Kordov's debut novel because it showed such confidence in its own texture right out the gate that you'd be forgiven for thinking Kordov must have been a best-selling author for decades prior. I was floored. And so I picked up the sequel—All of Our Sins—the first moment I possibly could. And like The Hand of God before it, it did not disappoint! To plagiarize myself again, All of Our Sins was filled with the same densely descriptive, evocative prose that Kordov mastered right out of the gate with his debut; but all in service of setting up a grander, future conflict than any contained within its own pages. All of Our Sins was a buffet of character studies and deeper explorations of the players introduced in The Hand of God, that slowly brought together the disparate story threads of the first novel towards whatever grand conclusion awaited us in Book 3. 

And now we’ve got Book 3. 

I was realizing as I began writing this review, and thinking about how to present it, that the Dark Legacies series can—by way of the most surface-level, casual explanation—sound awfully pedestrian. It’s a series of books set in a post apocalypse where demons have overrun the world and the human survivors are split between three competing, variously religious factions. Oh, and there are mechs. Your mind might immediately conjure images of some amalgamation of Neon Genesis Evangelion and (as already teased) Mad Max, with a dash of Constantine, DOOM, Warhammer 40K, and the post-Judgement Day Terminator films (and there are the arcs of two characters that I think could make for fascinating companion reading with Anne McCaffery’s The Ship Who Sang). But that would not do the stories held within the pages of Dark Legacies any justice. 

One of the things I strive for in my own fiction is making the worlds of my stories feel “lived-in”. So often I get the keen sense in SF and Fantasy stories (not just in books, but also television and film) that everything outside the view of the protagonists just kind of pauses when the main characters aren’t there. But the world of Dark Legacies is as lived-in as it can possibly be. Its world lives and breathes even when the characters aren’t present. In The World to Come especially, we truly get the sense that there is always something happening just outside the margins of the page. The world evolves and shifts with the passage of time in ways that the characters will need to deal with; and it feels at times almost as through Kordov must have actually written five or six books into this third one, and in the final product is simply being selectively choosy about which part of each book to show us at a given time, constructing some curiously-shaped, Jefferson Bible of a novel in the process. Through this construction, what we don’t see becomes just as important as what we do. It is a kind of tactically precise narrative vision (which I called “Swiss-watchmaker-ly” in my Goodreads review of The Hand of God), that delivers to the reader exactly what we need at that moment, while also setting your mind ablaze with the prospect (and consequence) of what is happening just off the edge of the page. It is a dizzying tightrope walk which Kordov treads with balletic ease. 

The World to Come and Dark Legacies also tightrope walk a number of genre lines, dancing between action, horror, fantasy, and sci-fi in surprising ways; though the horror of Dark Legacies always lingers between the words on the page, regardless of whatever else is happening in the moment. One of the more memorably horrifying passages in The World to Come evokes the grotesque, environmental body horror of things like Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Dead Astronauts; but we could quantify the horror of Dark Legacies more broadly as H.P. Lovecraft does in The Festival: 

Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl. 

And even in the midst of these horrors, the characters of Dark Legacies and The World to Come—though they all exist within a fantastical, twisted, nightmarish waste of a world—all feel like real people. This could be due in part to the fact that Kordov does not shy away from documenting these characters’ bodily functions, but I think much of the grounding of these characters comes from Kordov’s meticulous and thoughtful development of their inner lives. Every POV character thinks and feels like a real person, with specific fears, doubts, hopes, dreams, and motivations to get them from page 1 to the conclusion. And if I could hone in on the “hopes, dreams, and motivations” idea for a second, I think that Kordov’s decision to call this series Dark Legacies is not merely a bit of evocative wordsmithery, but is, in fact, quite deliberate.

Like I said in the intro, as I read The World to Come, I kept thinking of George Miller saying, “Just because these characters exist in an ugly world, that doesn’t mean they stop making beautiful things.”

In Dark Legacies, we see this idea manifest in a variety of ways: in the ornamental armor of Bastion’s soldiers, in the bespoke designs of myriad Scavrat vehicles, in the construction of the grand city of Cathedral; but in The World to Come, we see this idea manifest in a more intangible, but no less important way: in the legacies of the characters. 

The beauty being created by the characters in The World to Come—as the title indicates—is in their leaving behind of something better for those who will follow; in their making the world a little bit better for the next generation. Each character goes about this task in different ways, as each is groaning toward different, personal goals; but while the events of the first two books had a certain immediacy, with all the characters just focused on getting through whatever specific crucible they were in at the moment, The World to Come opens up and casts its eyes to the horizon. We see this most clearly in the tale of Mother Rebekah and her quest to make a better world for her daughter; and there is an urgency and weight to these sections of the book that I’m certain come from Kordov’s own experiences as a father. And at the end of the day The World to Come is—as are, I think, the best works in the genre— gorgeously optimistic. Though it traffics in bleak, unknowable horror for vast swaths of its narrative; The World to Come takes great pains to show us that this is not an all-consuming horror, it is not a darkness that cannot be pushed back. If anything, the only thing stopping the darkness from being pushed back is ourselves, through our infighting and paranoia and nationalism. It’s through the conquering of these ideas that humanity can, and will, push back the encroaching hordes. But will we be able to conquer them in time? 

The ending of The World to Come is a beautiful, moving bookend to the very first pages of The Hand of God, showing us a tiny sliver (like the title says!) of the world of come, and the light that can be borne from darkness. 

And for those of you typing in the comments TALK ABOUT THE MECHS, though these books are chalk-full of heady, philosophical and theological musings, there is plenty of kinetic, bone-shattering violence to be had as well; both at the hands of our human characters, their supernaturally-gifted counterparts, and the mammoth AI-piloted Battle Walkers that roam the blasted wastes of the old earth. Kordov doesn’t just write great “thinker” prose, he writes great action too. Aleph is my best friend. I also read the first 100 or so pages of this thing blasting the Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon soundtrack, and it rocked. 

The World to Come will formally release on September 3, 2024; so until then, get your pre-orders in, and catch up on books one and two! I promise you won’t regret it.