My Cultural Diet

Given that James S.A. Corey — the nom de plume of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck — wrote The Expanse, arguably one of the best sci-fi series in recent history, I went into The Mercy of Gods with no small amount of excitement and expectation. With its tale of humans enslaved by a superior species and caught up in a vast interstellar war, the duo’s latest certainly promises to be the start of another riveting space opera. But The Mercy of Gods is a lot of set-up, with very little pay-off in its 400+ pages. Being the first novel in The Captive’s War trilogy, that’s to be somewhat expected. Even so, an inordinate amount of the novel feels like busy work, with Abraham and Franck just maneuvering their characters into place for the second novel. There’s plenty of fascinating world-building — the two writers have certainly created a fascinating menagerie of alien cultures and technologies — so I have hope that the second novel will prove more engrossing, now that laying the foundation is done and out of the way.

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