The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War, #1) in SpecFic Buddy Reads

Aug 07, 2024 Niki Hawkes - The Obsessive Bookseller rated it it was amazing

Shelves: arcs, upcoming-releases-with-covers

[4.5/5 stars] I love that we’re getting more scifi from these amazing authors! And to boot it’s something tied to the Expanse universe, albeit far removed from almost everything that’s familiar about that series. But so far, the Captive’s War is shaping up to be a completely different, but equally satisfying, experience!

But one thing that hasn’t changed is their mastery of character work. To take you into the granular details of what it means to be human coping with an unsympathetic existence. T ...more

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Aug 09, 2024 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sci-fi, 2024-shelf, space-opera

First thing first, this isn't the Expanse. It is, however, a truly fascinating exploration of a vast prisoner's dilemma on the scale of many, many civilizations.

A hive-like alien civilization basically hoovers-up every alien species in its range, and we humans just happen to be in its path -- on this lonely, strange, colony world.

We follow its scientists and survivors among what amounts to an absentee landlord that just cherry-picks the best parts of our civilization, or any civilization, and us ...more

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Aug 08, 2024 Trish rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

WHY! Why am I doing this to myself?! Why am I starting a series by authors I KNOW are awesome at cliffhangers, only to despair when getting to the cliffhanger and realizing I will have to wait Idon'tknowhowlong for the next installment??? *frustrated groan*

Welcome to the planet Anjin. We don't know too much about its topography or flora and fauna besides some mentions and the fact that humans are living on it. How we came to live there? Who knows?!
In the beginning, we follow some scientists that WHY! Why am I doing this to myself?! Why am I starting a series by authors I KNOW are awesome at cliffhangers, only to despair when getting to the cliffhanger and realizing I will have to wait Idon'tknowhowlong for the next installment??? *frustrated groan*

Welcome to the planet Anjin. We don't know too much about its topography or flora and fauna besides some mentions and the fact that humans are living on it. How we came to live there? Who knows?!
In the beginning, we follow some scientists that just had a breakthrough - one that has someone very nervous and seem to mean something, though we don't yet know what.
Then, all of a sudden, aliens arrive in Anjin space and ... take over. They are such an overwhelming force that it's over pretty quickly and the humans didn't stand a chance.
The scientists we had followed in the beginning are taken prisoner by the Carryx (the invading aliens) and put to some mysterious work. It is thus that we meet all the other conquered species on the ships / Carryx world.

Seeing an alien invasion through the eyes of scientists and to then experience being relocated and "re-educated" through them as well was highly interesting. I mean, ideally, they react much more rationally, observe better than average humans, and can draw important conclusions.

The fact that there was another alien, hidden so to speak, only made it more mysterious because: just how many are there? Are the Carryx top dog or not? Why do they want the best and brightest in every field of the species they conquer? Why didn't they kill all the rest and destroy or take over Anjin? What is the work the scientists are supposed to do for the Carryx really for?
(view spoiler)

The more answers we get, the more questions pop up and it hints at one hell of a huge universe opening up in this new series.

So far, I'm not really interested in (m)any of the characters, but that was also not necessary to get swept up in the events and be really invested. There is just so much to explore!

The writing was as great as in the authors' last series so absolutely no complaints there.

Can't wait for the next installment! ...more

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Aug 15, 2024 Cathy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2024, atozchallenge

Really good space opera. Thoughtful, entertaining, good plot, good characters, great ideas. Twisty, thinky… we‘ve been discussing our little socks off in our buddy reading group, what it all means. You have to commit to the series though, because we are not even close to the end of the story after this first book—which doesn‘t feel like set-up for later books, it was good on it‘s own, but there will be so much more… *happy*

Narrated by the same person as the Expanse novels, this feels like comfor ...more

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Aug 03, 2024 Lata rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: arc, sf-f-h, 2024-read

Dafyd Alkhor is member of highly skilled and driven team on the plant Anjiin. The team has just had a breakthrough: they have been able to figure out something revolutionary but receive the bad news that their team will be broken up and redeployed to other teams, though the research will continue with others' effort. To the team leader, Tonner Freis, this is disastrous, and Dafyd is just suggesting a way to combat the ruling, when the unthinkable happens: aliens arrive on the planet.

Despite the Dafyd Alkhor is member of highly skilled and driven team on the plant Anjiin. The team has just had a breakthrough: they have been able to figure out something revolutionary but receive the bad news that their team will be broken up and redeployed to other teams, though the research will continue with others' effort. To the team leader, Tonner Freis, this is disastrous, and Dafyd is just suggesting a way to combat the ruling, when the unthinkable happens: aliens arrive on the planet.

Despite the armed planetary response, humans watch as friends and family are slaughtered around them, and very quickly humans are vanquished. The survivors are grouped by a variety of aliens, put on transports, then sent offworld in a trip that lasts weeks.

Interestingly, there is another alien species present amongst the humans, prior to the invasion, and we follow their interesting perspective on the events. (At first I wondered what was the purpose of this character, but this alien has an important part to play as the book's events progress.)

Dafyd quickly finds the rest of the research team (Else Yannin, Jessyn, Irinna, Campar, and Synnia) aboard the ship he's on, and they suffer indignities, hunger and filth, and eventually arrive on the world of the massive, insectoid Carryx, who are in charge of the aliens who came to Anjiin. The humans are told that they will be able to continue their work, as the Carryx find the scientific projects on Anjiin useful. While this pleases Tonner and the rest of the team, except for Synnia, in fact, this is a critical warning to all the survivors taken from Anjiin. Either prove compliant and useful, or die.

What follows is weeks of the team applying their skills to their new research project; but what is actually more interesting is the disastrous effect their kidnapping and imprisonment has upon them. Authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank (a.k.a. James S.A. Corey) focus on each member of the research team, and the profound psychological trauma they have all suffered, and how they each react to their changed circumstances.

We get to know Dafyd, and Jessyn particularly well, but the authors show the breakdowns and ways of coping each member of the team experiences. (The alien who got scooped up along with the humans on Anjiin is also present on the Carryx planet, and gradually we become aware of how it is managing and what its intent is.) The team's members display, varyingly, anger, a desire for purpose and activity, suicidal feelings, depression and curiosity.

For those who enjoyed “The Expanse” (I certainly did!) this is NOT “The Expanse”. This is a very different story; it is a deep examination of these ideas: what is humanity?, what does it mean to survive?, what do you do when everyone and everything that matters to you is gone?, and what room is there for creativity and compassion under utilitarianism?

The pacing is much slower than I expected, but so much of this book is about the emotional damage of the team, and the questions I mentioned above while the team is confronted by a species whose highest focus is utilitarian.

The authors have succeeded in creating truly alien aliens, whose behaviour remains impenetrable by their human prisoners, who often erroneously persist in applying human values and beliefs to the often perplexing behaviour of their captors and other fellow captive aliens.

The story was satisfying, and I look forward to the next instalment on this new and strange world, and wonder what's next for Dafyd and company.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Orbit Books for this ARC in exchange for my review. ...more

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Oct 29, 2024 Christina Pilkington rated it really liked it

Shelves: tbr-2024-to-be-released

For the first half of The Mercy of Gods, I wasn't sure I was going to like it.

The plot of the novel takes off within the first few chapters, moving at a breakneck speed. Some readers might enjoy this, but we're introduced to a group of people in a short amount of time, and I wasn't given a chance to get to know them or care before bad things started happening to them.

But somewhere at the halfway mark, after I had a chance to get to know the characters and the world a little better, something v ...more

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Jul 19, 2024 Cobwebs-Iced-Across-SpaceTime rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2024_specfic_challenge, a1-netgalley, 2024_sf, all-sci-fi-my-challenge, all_alternative_history, a1-i-own-books, all-science, 2024_reads, 2024_net-galley, 2024_horror

THE MERCY OF GODS is the first in an upcoming new Series by James S. A. Corey, famed for the stunning EXPANSE Series. It's a compelling and immensely thought-provoking novel of Far Future, Alien-Contact Science Fiction. Rather, let us label this Speculative Fiction, as it is the nature of Speculative to incite in the reader the pondering of ethical, aesthetic, psychological, metaphysical, intellectual issues.

In the Far Future, human society "flourishes" on the planet Anjiin. Bureaucracy flouris ...more

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Aug 14, 2025 Jessica rated it liked it

very interesting take of a post-apocalyptic storyline with alien invasion. I think I'm going to need to read it a second time to give it a better chance. It definitely is a drama and it spends a lot of time building up that part of the story. I was a little disappointed that we don't get to much of the discovery of the "why" in this book. I feel like maybe there's a whole other spin-off to this storyline that I would be a lot more interested in. I'll have to decide if I want to know bad enough t ...more

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