The Mercy of Gods

Ensemble characters. Characters that say "yeah" semi-resignedly a lot. Some characters will die on you. It's constructed like The Expanse, but the plot is definitely going to go very differently.

The Carryx suddenly swoop in to the world of Anjiin, where humanity lives but where their origin is lost to time. The Carryx quickly conquer humans, killing 1 out of every 8. Dafyd Alkhor's group is transported across the universe to a glorified prison planet where the team is given the task of making themselves useful to the Carryx. If they do not, humanity will be obliterated. Lots of intra-group conflict. Lots of conflict with other prisoner species. Lots of perceived conflict with the Carryx, who mostly ignore them until they've proven themselves useful.

Do they collaborate and maybe live to fight the Carryx another day, or go out in a blaze of glory since it's likely humanity is going to die anyway so why not go down fighting? Climax is a giant trolley problem. Don't forget that trolley problems are largely constructed as thought exercises, and here it's a thought exercise to move the plot along. In other words, don't get too attached to the philosophy. Whichever way they go it's just a story.

This is the first book in a new James SA Corey series, and I enjoyed it a bunch.

High stakes academia gets interrupted by alien invasion; their research then becomes even more high stakes while having to navigate trauma and powerful alien political currents. A pithy but unhelpful summary is that this book is about systems thinking vs the just-world fallacy.

The aliens are interesting in several fresh ways; one in particular is that they largely don't give a shit, emotionally speaking. They aren't angry or greedy or vengeful, which gives a much different flavor to an alien invasion. A lot of enjoyment in any book where humans encounter aliens is also about their relations and the slow reveal of who and what the aliens are, and so I'll hold back some more spoiler-y opinions.

(One side note about this book is just how straight it felt. Maybe I just read too much queer fiction on the regular, but this [like other books by these authors] felt subjectively in the vein of "old school heterosexual science fiction" that I might have read when I was younger. Not everything has to be everything, but it was just something that stood out to me.)

Coming back to doing reviews after a year away. Sometimes, reviewing everything feels like a job (especially as I was doing reviews on both Goodreads and Mastodon) so a break was needed. It's kind of a shame this is the first review as the book was kind of not very good for me. I was a huge fan of The Expanse and one of it's great strengths, even in moments where it dipped a bit (a 9 book series is going to have dips), was the engaging characters. The Mercy of Gods very much did not have engaging characters, for me. Given the plot was a bit lacking in interest as well, this didn't make for a book that I could whole-heartedly enjoy or even recommend. It may have suffered from 'first in a series' issues but if the first in the series does not engage then how can someone be expected to get into the next installment? In short, something was off with this for me so I am giving it 3 stars. In my personal scoring lexicon that's a 'decently executed and I finished it but I can't recommend'.