The Mercy of Gods - James S.A. Corey

The Mercy of Gods is the start of a new sci-fi series from James S.A. Corey, the pen name of the writing duo responsible for The Expanse. As a big fan of their previous work, I was very excited to pick up this new work and see what they were up to. There was a danger that they wouldn't live up to the hype, and I can say that fear was unfounded. This is thoughtful, compelling, high-concept science-fiction, with characters that make us feel and understand a bit more about what it means to be human - and non-human characters whose perspectives will challenge, appall and excite the reader in equal measure. 

The protagonist is Dafyd Alkhor, whom we first meet at a faculty party. He's a research assistant for a group of scholars that's busy making history. Dafyd is a smart, thoughtful viewpoint, with an instinct for people and interpersonal politics. He's not powerful, but incisive and a little manipulative. Those he's surrounded by are all brilliant in their own ways, and flawed in others - from Tonner, the research lead with a towering intellect and an equally towering sense of self-importance, to Else, who gave up her own position as a research lead to be inside Tonner's group, and is also incidentally his girlfriend, to Jessyn, who matches a searing intelligence with struggles to keep an even keel. While the story takes a while to get going, it uses its time wisely, building out these people, their lives, their hopes and dreams and darker desires, their pride, their flaws, their hubris, their leaps of intellect and occasional misadventures. We come to them with nothing, and Corey uses the start of the story to turn them into living, breathing people. Recognisably from a different cultural context, but still people we could recognise if we saw them in the street - from the venal to the brilliant and back again in the space of a breath. 

And the world they inhabit is there as well, one where humanity has entered an interstellar age - and then forgotten. Where people live on another world with a dual biosphere - and don't know why. With politics and institutions that are rich and filled with veins of lore and the crackle of hidden history told in a newsreel. A world that has texture, and a past. Dafyd and his friends live somewhere we can recognise, even if its about forty-five degrees off what we'd normally see looking out the window.

And then, right about the time you're trying to work out what the point is, it's all washed away. An outside-context-even shatters Dafyd's personal universe, and his world. An alien fleet descends and seizes  everything and everyone it deems useful, and whisks them away to, well, elsewhere. And that's where the groundwork becomes essential, as the book becomes less a space opera, and more of a survival story. A story of trauma and how we respond to it. A story of what it takes to make it through another day, and the compromises and decisions someone will make to ensure not just their own survival but the survival of their friends, or their species. And it doesn't shy away from exploring these questions either, of calling out when those compromises might be self-delusional grasps for a shred of comfort, or when the necessary thing is also a terrible thing. Where horrors force someone to behave like a captor they despise to survive, and what that does to someone, or to a group. It's by tunrs brutal and transcendent. I described it to a friend as "deeply harrowing". It's a story that drinks deeply from the well of human misery, from abrupt, seemingly arbitrary executions, to uncaring captors leaving their prisoners to become useful - or die. From people cowering in their nightgowns, to exploring the moral compromises and definitions of resistance. It's a book that delves into what it means to be human, what it means to survive, what it means to live.

It's a complicated story, which survives, first on the in-depth characterisation, as we see people we've come to know slowly change in the crucible of being alien POW's, and second on a world which is only revealed to us one strand at a time, but promises to be a flavourful gumbo of deeply weird alien cultures, all with their own histories, their own perspectives, their own agenda. Our protagonist and his friends and colleagues are blindsided, confused, and desperate to learn what's going on to ensure their own survival - and so are we, right along with them. And Corey does something wonderful here, giving us the Carryx, an antagonist so strange we're not even entirely sure what it is they want, why they're doing what they're doing, what their goals are and how their society functions. Some of this comes out over the course of the text, and uncovering it alongside Dafyd's group (and occasionally, shortly before) makes for a powerful and at times revelatory narrative experience.

In any case. Before I go on too much. Not to overstate it, this isn't The Expanse. This is something new. But it has a lot of the same hallmarks. Complex moral questions. A humanity on the brink of paradigm-shattering change. Characters whom you can live with love with, cry with, hate and love and empathise with, often over the course of a few pages. Sprawling, detailed societies filled with those little details that make them real. A commitment to asking big, hard questions and letting the reader push themselves toward answers, where there are any. And a fierce, for want of another word, faith in humanity, or at least in people. This isn't The Expanse. It's something new. But it's also really bloody good, if you want to explore trauma, survival, deeply alien environments, prison complexes that are also alien civilisations, and, again, those big questions around who wand what we are, what it means to be people, what it means to be a person. It's slow start is more than paid off by the catharsis of its conclusion, and if it took me a while to really let it get going, once it did, I couldn't take my eyes off the page. Top notch stuff, that lives up to the hype.