The Mercy of Gods
James S.A. Corey
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780316525572
Orbit, August 2024, 560 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’ll be diving into the first of a brand new series by a well known name, a novel I described to a friend as “survivors from a generation arkship get enslaved by totalitarian mantis shrimp,” and honestly there’s so much cool stuff going on in this thing that I’m going to barely scratch the surface but I’ll do my best to sum up The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey in a way that doesn’t sound like a fever dream (but I make no promises).

I’m going to break from my usual review structure here and say that my immediate impression of The Mercy of Gods was that it feels like Ursula K. Le Guin and Frank Herbert (who the authors specifically mention as inspirations), along with CJ Cherryh, Peter Hamilton, and Art Spiegelman all got together in a bar, poured more than a few tall ones, and then decided to write the intro to a sprawling space opera that is equal parts overwhelmingly bombastic splendor as it is an almost laser-focused study of human nature. This book is a masterpiece of dichotomies: an incredibly slow burn until the moments when it turns breath-holdingly frenetic; recognizably human until the moments when the alien otherness claws out at you from the pages; a churning maelstrom of the current zeitgeist that somehow manages to feel timeless in the themes it addresses, and if you think all of these superlatives are unearned, then I challenge you to read the thing, because I promise you that they are.

(Pause for breath.)

Ostensibly, the plot of The Mercy of Gods begins with the isolated human settlement on the planet Anjiin, a collection of scientific researchers doing sciency things on a planet none of them can say for certain they originated on, busy backstabbing each other for funding and recognition (obviously this has no parallels to modern life) until the ships of the alien Carryx arrive to subjugate everyone in order to see if “they are of use,” and while I’m summing that up in a single sentence, Corey does an impeccable job of making us care about the stakes of each individual life in the initial stages of the book. Motivations are clear, characters are breathed to life in less than a paragraph, and the essential trappings of a thriving world are established well before the implacable force from beyond the stars arrives to impose its will. Petty squabbles are present but don’t intrude, vital connections are forged in seemingly meaningless ways, and then everything changes forever.

As someone with a degree in history and political science (please forgive the tangent, I promise it will make sense), the way Corey builds up to the arrival of the Carryx is a masterpiece in how it manages to convey the sense of being something completely out of the ordinary, but also that it’s something we’ve done to ourselves so many times before, and might yet do again. Violence in the name of peace is imposed, so-called elites are rounded up into transports that may or may not bring them safely to an undisclosed location, prisoners attempt to navigate their way between the demands of life in a death camp and the demands of what it means to be human, all the while suffering under the yoke of a seemingly incomprehensible overlord that regards death as a final and perfect solution.

Take a moment if you need to, because the subtext in this book is only subtle if you’re willfully blinding yourself to what’s going on in our current reality, and for that I have to tip my hat to Corey. It would be way too easy to deliver this message in a way that falls short or rings hollow, yet it persists over and over in such a natural way that to read it is to wonder why we allow such a thing to exist at all (and hopefully it reaches some people who think they’re the heroes even as they cheer on the villains). The motivations of the Carryx are alien only in that they describe a mindset that has no place for choice or individuality, yet it is a mindset that exists and is recognizable, one that demands what is, is, simply by virtue of it existing as it is, and to strive for something else, something better, is to be met with the whipcrack lash of death’s fist. It is the violence of the overseer, the caste system of the untouchables, the arbitrary assignation of value of the techbro, and it is entirely human at its core. That it’s accompanied by grotesquely wonderful alien landscapes does nothing to minimize the horror of what it represents, and what we’re in danger of doing, once again, to ourselves.

Alas, I’ve preached too much and reached my word limit for this month, so all I can leave you with is this—The Mercy of Gods is not just an excellent start to a star-spanning space opera, one that condenses heavy ideas into digestible chunks wrapped in a familiarly unfamiliar package, it is also a remarkably cogent treatise on the horrors that await us if we forget what we’re capable of in the name of enforced unity. I eagerly await the next installation in the series, and hope that our reality is one that allows it to be written.