The creators of The Expanse (both the nine books and the popular six-season streaming series) are back with the first book of a new series. The Mercy of Gods is an utterly absorbing alien invasion first contact thriller that I could not put down.
The setting is in the distant future, among humans living on the planet Anjiin. We don’t know how long people have lived there or whether there are other humans elsewhere in the galaxy. They share the planet with a silicon-based biome that existed before people arrived, but have developed large areas for agricultural production with carbon-based plants, animals, microbes, etc., brought from Earth. For the most part, the two biomes remain separate and distinct, but scientists are working on ways to allow the two to “nourish each other.”
We join the story as a team of molecular biologists has won an award for a major breakthrough in that field, headed by lead researcher Tonner Freis. Our main point of view in the story is through Dafyd Alkhor, Freis’s research assistant, who has a crush on Freis’s research partner and lover, Else Yannin. Other members of the team include an elderly couple, Nöl and Synnia, plus Campar, Rickar, and Jessyn, a young research assistant who lives with her brother and who harbors a potentially career destroying secret. At various points throughout the (physical) book’s 400-some pages the viewpoint briefly shifts among all of them.
At this point The Mercy of Gods was basically a campus novel set in outer space, and I was becoming skeptical. The dramatic tension was apparently going to focus on whether this team gets split up as part of the ongoing internecine conflicts that always reign in the campus or academic novel (something I didn’t realize was even a thing until shortly before I started reading this book).
But then we’re introduced to an alien presence, a different voice that refers to itself as the Swarm. It’s observing these humans from some point of view we don’t understand yet, and contemplating an existential danger that is rapidly approaching them and their planet. At the same time, Tonner and his team find that the scientific community’s focus has shifted from them and their award winning work to a different team of scientists (which includes Jessyn’s brother Jellit) who have detected some sort of anomalous presence in their solar system.
Almost before the people on Anjiin can react, this unknown presence invades with blitzkrieg tactics that make Germany’s invasion of Poland look like a leisurely game of Monopoly. Let’s just say it does not go well for humanity. Skip the next part if you don’t want plot spoilers.
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The invading force is called the Carryx, a rapacious and highly advanced civilization that believes it exists to rule the universe. Though insectile, its members are individuals, not part of a collective consciousness like Orson Scott Card’s Hive Mind in the Ender books. Its entire existence consists of idenfying other civilizations, deciding whether they are potentially useful, and either subjecting or destroying them. Utterly.
This is not a tension filled, slow burn of an invasion like in the Apple TV series Invasion. Within a day or two of being spotted by Jellit’s team, the Carryx have ensnared the planet in some kind of electromagnetic mesh, destroyed military bases, and rounded up those it wants to take home and use — all the top scientists, politicians, perhaps even artists and farmers — we don’t know because Tonner and his group don’t know. The Carryx randomly kill one in eight of them as a show of force, put the rest on transport ships and carry them in group prison cells for several weeks through hyperspace with only the clothes on their backs and the bare minimum of sustenance. A couple of other alien species act as dispassionate but ruthless jailers.
We follow Dafyd and his team through this hell and on to a planet that seems to be a series of immense arcologies, where they’re given quarters, meet their Carryx overseer, and told to basically carry on their work, only with representatives of different biomes. They’re given two different life forms from entirely different evolutionary environments and told to figure out how to make it so that one of them can eat the other. If they’re useful they’ll survive.
So it remains at heart an academic novel crossed with a space opera, but the stakes are much higher than who will win in the next round of grants or get the next Nobel or its equivalent. We get to know Tonner’s team — and they get to know themselves and each other — in a way that’s only possible under extreme stress. All have their strengths and weaknesses and some have surprises in store. Dafyd, though not a great scientist, turns out to be great at analyzing complex situations and detecting pattern and meaning. Jessyn struggles with a mental disorder and almost dies when she runs out of the pills she smuggled out of Anjiin, but turns out to have unsuspected reserves of strength. And we eventually find out that one of the team is harboring the Swarm, a construct from yet another civilization that is at war with the Carryx.
The Carryx of course turn out to have some vulnerabilities. One is their sheer arrogance. They’ve come to believe their own hype. And most or even all of the stupendous technologies they have aren’t theirs, but those of the civilizations they’ve conquered. As this introductory book of the saga ends, our human friends have begun to figure that out, and look forward to exploiting those vulnerabilities as they go on trying to survive by being useful.
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As with the crew of Rocinante in The Expanse, “Corey” (a.k.a. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) has created a team of distinct individuals for the reader to identify with, each having their own strengths, weaknesses and quirks. And then put them into an unimaginably stressful situation that brings out their best and sometimes worst traits. The plot draws on elements of Holocaust narratives, prison narratives and of course the campus novel, all in the midst of a fantastically constructed space opera. It’s also influenced by a classical, or rather Biblical source that I’m embarrassed I didn’t spot: The Book of Daniel, in which the Israelites are dragged off to Babylon for a generations-long captivity.
The universe of The Mercy of Gods is one that I won’t forget, and I can’t wait for the next installment in this trilogy.
As you can learn on James S. A. Corey’s website, their new Expanding Universe content company is developing a series based on this story, working title The Captive’s War.
(Orbit Books, 2024)
