Review: The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey

Official Author Website
Buy The Mercy of Gods

OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: James S.A. Corey is the pen name of fantasy author Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. They both live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Find out more about this series and other works at www.danielabraham.com.

FORMAT/INFO: The Mercy of Gods will be published by Orbit Books on August 6th, 2024. It is 432 pages and is told in third person through multiple POVs. It is available in hardcover and ebook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: It was an ordinary day when the Carryx arrived. Dafyd and the other scientists had mundane things to worry about, like a rival scientific institute trying to poach their team members. But in just a few short days, the entire planet was enslaved. Weeks later, Dafyd and the rest of the research team now live in a compound on a completely different planet, living alongside dozens of other races enslaved by the Carryx. It soon becomes clear that the fate of humanity depends on whether these scientists can prove to the Carryx that they are a “useful” race - but what useful means to the Carryx is anybody’s guess, and there’s only so much time before their conquerors decide humans are simply a waste of space.

The Mercy of Gods is a pressure cooker of a space opera, with survival politics crammed into a claustrophobic setting. From the first page, the book is thrumming with the tension of the coming invasion, everyone going about their day like normal while the reader counts down to normalcy going out the window. That tension continues throughout the book, as our group of humans is thrown from one traumatic situation to another, forced to adapt to the existence of alien life alongside the very real possibility that humans may not be around for much longer. It’s a mad scramble to find a way to victory - but not everyone agrees on what victory for humans will look like.

Although the synopsis on the jacket indicates that this is Dafyd’s story, this is a multi-pov book; in fact, I would go so far as to say that Dafyd is actually a relatively minor character in the story. Pivotal, to be sure, but with over a half dozen POVs, his chapters take up a fairly small number of pages. Personally, I wished for a little more time with Dafyd, especially given the foreshadowing about his role in future events. Even so, Dayfd does have some of the more fascinating story beats even within his small sections; it is Dafyd, after all, who first begins to try and understand the thinking of the Carryx and the other alien races. I’ll be very interested to see how his role continues to evolve and grow over the course of the series.

The other characters are equally intriguing in their own ways as they process their traumas and new circumstances in different ways. Despite the multi-POVs, it’s still a story told in a very narrow slice of space, with about 3/4 of the story taking place in this alien prison complex. I will say that there was one POV and storyline that I had mixed feelings about that I cannot go into too much detail on due to spoilers. It was a storyline utterly fascinating in one regard, but at the same time, I was a little uncomfortable in the way it was executed.

This was the kind of book one that left me with SO MANY QUESTIONS at the end. Some series are written where each book is a self-contained arc that also moves an overall story arc forward; this instead felt like part one of one giant story arc. A big story moment is definitely reached, but it left me with more questions than answers about how we got to that point and where we go from here. Hopefully this series will have flawless plotting and everything is going to land beautifully by the finale, with all my questions answered. For now, I’m just dying for more of the story because I want to know why things are the way they are.

CONCLUSION: The Mercy of Gods is a solid opening salvo in a promising new sci-fi series. It touches on one of my favorite themes in space operas: the fallacy of attributing human motivations to a completely alien culture. That’s the part that I’m the most excited to dive into and get answers about in the coming books: the thinking and motivation of the Carryx. Our heroes have clearly just begun to scratch the surface of that problem, and the set up for the sequel promises to really explore and expand on what we know of this alien empire. It’s a great premise and I cannot wait to keep exploring this world in the future.