Cheng Bogdani's Reviews > The Mercy of Gods

Like most of the rest of scifi fandom, I eagerly awaited this start of a new scifi series from SA Corey. "The Expanse" is, IMHO, the highpoint of modern epic scifi for so many reasons. Characterization, however, was never the strongest point of the series. Lets be honest, it was all about setting wind-up characters into amazing and exotic situations to see how they'd make history unfold.

The Mercy of Gods has a much different scope. I'll repeat the blurb here - after a sudden and brutal colonization of their planet, a small cadre of humans are whisked away to an open prison where they are forced to work on a project for their new rulers, a species called Carryx. Most of the novel takes place in cramped quarters with no privacy - this is a novel that relies heavily on the characters to drive the tension and emotional plot.

I felt shades of Red Mars through the latter two thirds of the book. A tiny group of humans in an alien and dangerous landscape trying to get along with each other and solve the bigger problems of their survival. The problem I have with the book is that the characters lack both depth and dynamicy. These are more wind-up automatons with a set of shallow motivations and skin-deep characteristics that are expected to go through their motions while they slowly learn more about the Carryx and their role in the prison. Frankly, the pace was just a bit too slow. The characters have too much responsibility for the amount of screen time they get, and they just aren't interesting enough to carry the load.

The worldbuilding, however, is brilliant and is absolutely the reason I kept going with this. So that's two of three stars of my rating right there. The aliens are thoughtfully different, the technology is interesting and barely Mary-Sues through the typical problems that usually get glossed over (communication, biological necessities, etc). What the authors really nail here is the sense of a mindset, way of thinking, logical rules, and even biological structure that's completely divorced from mammalian norms. The Carryx society does seem draw heavily from human divine-emperor civilizations; even the descriptions of the different castes brings to mind the court of the Han empire at their zenith.

This is a creative work with some amazing world building with some mediocre characters at the center of it. The book is clearly the introduction to a series; the scope starts out way too small and by the end we see our main characters standing on the precipice of a Big New World. It's an easy read, even if the pace is a bit slow. I will read the second book in the series, but only because it looks like it's going to have more plot around the alien culture and human/alien interactions.


Reading Level: easy adult
Romance: sort of? It was so poorly done it barely counts
Smut: sex happens but it's only implied
Violence: yes, but only sporadically
TW: colonization, enslavement