The Mercy of Gods

 "The Expanse" author James SA Corey continues their generational sci-fi run with a new trilogy, "The Captive's War." In it, humanity suddenly finds itself in the clutches of the alien Carryx. Their choices: demonstrate their usefulness and find a niche within their empire, and in so doing accept an eternity of servitude... or perish. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The following will contain spoilers for roughly the first third of the James S.A. Corey novel The Mercy of Gods. The overall story and character arcs will still be a mystery to you if you decide to pick the book up, but there's a lot of really cool stuff that I want to talk about that I can't talk about without giving away some of the early developments in the plot. Now without further ado. It feels like just yesterday that Leviathan Falls, the final book in the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, came out. There were a lot of science fiction fans, myself included, who were eagerly waiting to see what the Corey boys did next, what this new trilogy they had planned was going to look like, and whether they still had something to say after the monumental feat that was the Expanse. Fast forward a few years and here we are. Book 1 of the Captives War trilogy has been out for almost two years, the sequel is now upon us, a TV adaptation for the trilogy has been announced, and the question of whether James S.A. Corey still got it has been definitively answered. Yes. Yes, they do. The Mercy of Gods officially kicks off the Captives War trilogy, and it's a very different beast from the Expanse series, which, by the way, it's completely separate from. The authors have confirmed multiple times that the Captives War and the Expanse are in no way related to one another. But anyway, the Mercy of Gods is a much slower and much more considered experience than the typical Expanse Fair. It's a lot quieter than the Expanse. It likes to take its time and ease you into its story and its universe. Where a lot of the Expanse tension comes from action sequences and peril. The tension in the Mercy of Gods comes from this oppressive and inescapable dread that just permeates the entire story once things finally get going. We don't have any stolen Martian gunship to kick button in this book. Our protagonists are completely at the mercy of gods. I'm sorry, at the mercy of brutally and horrifically indifferent aliens. The book has a framing device, this being the final statement of a being called Ikurtakal. I have no idea how that's supposed to be pronounced, but Daniel Abraham also said in an interview that I could pronounce it however I want, so this is what we're rolling with. Ikur to Kalal is the keeper librarian of the human moiety of the Carrix, and in its testimony it outlines presumably the final failure of its people. It makes allusions to wars that have lasted for eons, and it hints at events that will happen in later books. It speaks of a thousand worlds burning, and it makes the case that everything that went wrong started when the Carrix went after this unassuming, pathetically weak planet known as Angine. Angien is home to a well-established and flourishing human civilization. It's a planet of vast farmland and oceans, and its three billion or so inhabitants have split off into all kinds of nations and cities and states and whatnot. The people here are more or less on our modern-day Earth level of technology. We're not part of any interstellar civilization or anything like that. We live on Angine and Angine alone. For all intents and purposes, Angine is a reflection of the world that you and I live in, but with one key difference. Humanity, absolutely, 1 million percent did not originate on Angine. And we know this because of the life humanity shares Angine with. There are plenty of things on Angine that you and I would recognize, like humans and dogs and plants and whatnot, but there is also life here that is fundamentally different from any Earth-based life. It's very simplistic and slow compared to the more sophisticated tree of life we represent. And these two trees of life exist pretty much in their own vacuums. They're so different from one another that there are virtually no meaningful interactions between them whatsoever. There are no contagions that can be traded amongst them. They can't eat each other and get any nutritional value out of it. They bounce off of each other in virtually every way two trees of life can. Now the fossil record shows that the more unadvanced tree of life has been evolving on Angin for billions of years, whereas humanity doesn't show up until about 3,500 years before the story begins. Which is intriguing, again, considering humanity does not have the capability to travel between planets, let alone solar systems. So the fact that something so different from Angin's typical ecosystem ended up on Angine for no apparent reason is a little abnormal. And it seems like everybody on the planet has their own explanation as to how in the world this happened. For example, there are religious sects out there who believe God destroyed an entire universe, but chose this one clutch of faithful humans to save and deposit into another universe onto the chosen world of Angine, which, by the way, bears some pretty striking similarities to the story of Noah's Ark. There are others who believe that humanity's homeworld was actually the second planet in Angin's solar system, and that we were carried here to Angie by this giant spacefaring bird. And honestly, those explanations are as good as anything else that science has been able to come up with, because some really weird stuff happened when humans first showed up on this planet. We originally only inhabited this one small island with all of our associated, more familiar forms of life, but it seems like not long after we just spontaneously popped into existence on this island that there was this kind of disaster that glassed most of it. It's from the survivors of this event that all of the human-based life on Angin are descended. It's these descendants who would go on to spread their civilization to every corner of the planet. In the millennia sense, humanity has actually adapted very well to Angine, perhaps most notably in how they build their homes. On Earth, our basic building material is trees and wood, but Angin doesn't have trees or woods, so we make do with something called forest coral. Now, forest coral grows into these huge structures that are several stories tall and they're hollow, so they make for a great, plentiful, and easy-to-produce natural structure to put things in and to live in. And so most of the buildings on Anjine are not built, but rather grown. And it lends the whole planet to this kind of naturalistic aesthetic. It's such a far cry from the concrete jungle we're so used to seeing in real life and a lot of other science fiction. When you hear descriptions of these chor buildings, you get the sense of a version of humanity that's just so much more in tune with its ecosystem, has such a better symbiosis with its world than a lot of what we see in real life. That, and it's just a really neat and exotic aesthetic as well. I guess you don't need to extract some kind of highbrow artistic commentary from every little thing, right? Angean has a very sleepy atmosphere to it at times. There's plenty of huge cities, which of course are made of forest coral, but pretty much everything outside of them is very pastoral and idyllic. I mentioned earlier that most of the civilized portion of the planet is covered in farmland, and there's plenty of characters that hail from these tiny, isolated villages that have their own customs and belief systems. But because humans are humans, these more peaceful vibes are often juxtaposed by things like military conflicts and ideological genocides. Angine's nations are just as well equipped as ours with things like fighter jets and nukes and nuclear submarines and whatnot. But the lens that we, the reader, experience the world of Angine and the Captives War through is that of the scientific community. Where the main cast of the Expanse started off as crew members aboard the Waterhauler Canterbury, the main cast of the Captives War starts off as researchers on this biological science team led by a man named Tonner Freus. The Canterbury crew obviously needs to be very smart to do their jobs, but there's a sort of physicality and grittiness implicit in that job, whereas Tonner's biologists are much more cerebral in comparison. A quick side note, by the way, Daniel Abraham actually majored in biology in college. He's formally trained in this stuff, and he really got to flex his scientific muscles in the making of this book. And you could just tell that he was probably right at home writing these particular characters. He and Ty Frank have a way of hitting you with a lot of the minutiae their characters go through in their day-to-day lives so that they can counterbalance the insane universe-altering stuff that happens later. It's part of what made the Expanses cast so relatable, despite the books taking place mostly in space. These biologists are no different. There's a ton of respect for the scientific method, not just the Eureka moments and breakthroughs. You see a lot of the unsexy and not so glamorous and boring and frustrating parts of the process as well. I'm not a scientist, but it feels like a very authentic look into what that kind of life is like, at least to a layman like me. And so we join our intrepid biologists during the end-of-year celebrations at the Scholars Common. Think of it as a combination between a carnival and a networking event. If you're there, you're doing one of two things: toasting to another fruitful year of research, or doing whatever you can to cozy up with the elite in your respective field. And this year, Tonner and his team are on top of the world. Because they've made a discovery that changes everything. They've found a way to make Angine's native life nourishing to humans. It is the most important scientific breakthrough in history. It becomes yesterday's news very fast. Because mere days later, aliens make contact with Angine. The whole thing starts off with this huge network of telescopes on and around Angine, which detects this anomalous distortion effect out at the edge of the solar system. It looks a lot like the gravitational lensing effect you see in photos of distant galaxies or around the black hole in the movie Interstellar. All we know about it at first is that it seems to be conceiving some kind of mass, and that this mass, whatever it is, appears to be closing in on Angine. Obviously, nothing like this has ever been observed in nature, and the astronomy community on Angine begins coming to terms with the fact that this disturbance, whatever it is, is almost certainly artificial in nature. And then thousands upon thousands of alien ships appear in the skies of Angiene and surround the entire planet. In their panic, humanity launches a first strike against these alien ships, which is almost immediately swatted down, and the cities which launch this attack are obliterated. What follows is a broadcast which states, quote, You are individually and collectively under the authority of the Karyx. You have been measured, and your place within the Moieties will now be determined. Your distress with this change is irrelevant. Adapting quickly will reduce your discomfort and increase your potential utility. Ready yourselves. The announcement goes on To demonstrate that your submission is necessary, we will only kill one eighth of your population. End quote. And then one eighth of the population drops dead. That is humanity's introduction to the Carrix. The Carrix would want you to believe that they are an instrument of the universe, a primordial force of logic and reason that are there to open other aliens' eyes to their true purpose in life. What this means in practice is that the Karyx are an incredibly powerful, imperialistic alien race whose empire has swallowed up and incorporated hundreds of other species, while destroying thousands more in their relentless march across the cosmos. Species who once presided over their own empires comprising hundreds of worlds, and whose technological achievements dwarf anything Angenes ever managed, are now regarded as nothing more than animals in the Carrix's Moides. The Caryx themselves are imposing creatures of ruthless intelligence, as befitting the empire they've built. They look like gigantic lobsters who are bent up at the midsection the way a centaur would be. They have eight limbs total, four legs on their lower body for locomotion, two feeding arms, and two giant fighting arms that sort of resemble the arms of a mantis shrimp. They use these fighting arms mostly to get around, but when push comes to shove, they can also strike with the same lightning speed as their mantis shrimp brethren. Only instead of a tiny arthropod trying to crack a clamshell open, it's an elephant-sized alien. There's a raw and terrifying strength about the Carrix, as if their overwhelming technology wasn't enough. It's important to note, by the way, that beyond that eight-limbed body plan, the Carrix vary wildly from one individual to the next. Their shells can be any color or combination of colors you can think of, and it seems like every Caryx you meet is bigger than the last, with some being twice the size of what passes for average for them. Which, like I said, is already pretty huge. That would be the same as the tallest humans being 12 feet high compared to the rest of us. And these physical differences partially reflect lines that the Carrix have drawn up in their society. This is the society of the Carrics, not the Empire as a whole. The Karrix race is governed by a kind of caste system, with gendered Carrix occupying a higher social strata than ungendered Carrix. The Carrix put a lot of value on breeding and passing on one's genes, which ungendered Carrix obviously cannot do. Genderless Carrix are distinct and of higher standing than the animals of the Empire, but are typically looked down upon by their betters. But the thing about Carrix's gender is that it's a fluid and malleable thing, to a much greater extent than it is in humans. Carrix can be induced by their higher status fellows into a kind of metamorphosis, which can not only change their gender but also result in larger scale changes to their body plans. A successful Carrix might be given a gender and a form more appropriate for administrative tasks on one of the homeworlds, while a less successful Carrix might have their gender taken away from them and be made to grow into a huge but socially downtrodden soldier. These physical changes carry all the ramifications of promotions and demotions in human society. Even something as fundamental to us as gender is treated as a luxury amongst the Carrix. The Carrics see themselves as utterly beyond morality or philosophy. There is no emotion in any decision they make, just pure calculus. Utility is the most important thing to them. Reality is looked at only in terms of how it can be made to further their aims. Nothing else is considered. There's no inherent dignity to any life form, there's no value in things like art or music. Strength is the only thing the characters understand, and thus it's the only thing they will be governed by. They're the ultimate expression of might makes right, and any stumble, even if it's just for a second, is met with extremely harsh punishment. The Carrix compare their treatment of other races to cutting a branch off of a tree in order to make a spear. The tree has no say in the matter, and you yourself don't even really think about it, you just do it. The best summation of the Carrick's philosophy, or lack thereof, can be summed up by a phrase they utter time and time again throughout the book. That which is. It's the resigned motto of working class Americans everywhere, applied to a mind-bending interstellar empire. The Carrix turned, eh, it is what it is, into a cold hard fact of the universe. Now the Carrics are nothing, if not experts in recognizing strength, whether it's in their gendered peers or in the boons an animal can offer their empire. They're powerful on their own, yes, but what truly makes them a force to be reckoned with is what they've been able to incorporate into their war machine from the various beasts under their care. And they cast a wide net, too. Many races get caught up in their conquests, and only a few prove useful enough to live as thralls. Any who don't are cold. The Carrix Empire, as it currently exists, is the result of eons of widowing down and refining. The established races within their ranks outcompeted and out-obeyed numerous other less fortunate and less competent races to get where they are today. That, and they have a firm understanding of the Carrix's worldview. So what you're left with are creatures that are the absolute best in their particular niche, and who are true believers in, or at least utterly domesticated by, their overlords to boot. The Carrix took the concept of empire and optimized it to its absolute limits. The sheer breadth of anatomies and modes of thought the empire can throw at a problem is the thing that's made it great. The Carrix are the masterminds behind the whole thing, yes, but it's not exclusively the Carrix who are fighting wars or developing weapons or building cities. The technological and architectural and racial faces the Empire presents are so far beyond just the Carrix, and it's all the more formidable for it. For example, a Caryx is good in a fight, sure, but why deploy a Caryx and risk its life when you have animals infinitely better suited for combat and are way more expendable, like the Rakhund. The Rakhund serve as the Caryx's main foot soldiers, and they're basically the closest thing biology can produce to a living buzzsaw. Imagine a giant centipede as long as a car with swords for legs, which they use to stomp their enemies to death. The psychological aspect of that image alone is probably half the battle, but in case it's not, they also happen to be lightning fast and are able to close in on their targets in the blink of an eye. Even if you somehow catch one unawares, they're highly resistant to damage, so if your first shot doesn't kill it, you probably won't have time to get the second one off before it's right on top of you and repeatedly stabbing at you with all 100 of its legs. The Carrix also have creatures like the Soft Lothark, who have picked up a number of roles within the Empire. They operate a lot of the Caryx's ranged weapons in battle, and they have the critically important job of corralling and serving as jailers for the newly conquered aliens. They look a lot more conventional than the Rakhund or the Carrix, with a bipedal body plan and two arms and two legs and a head. They're described as being covered in fur and possessing beady little eyes, and a mouth that, quote, seemed too wide to be plausible, end quote. And just in case you thought all that was still a little too human-like, they also bleed acid and eat their dead. In general, they're a very unsettling and unreadable presence in the scenes they're in. Among the Carrix's most terrifying animals are the quote-unquote nameless quasi-species that serve as their living satellites. These creatures, often called nodes, will be deployed by the thousands to surround a planet the Carrix have designs on. They're an ominous sight from the ground, with beams of light linking each node to form what looks like a cage over the sky, presumably to interdict any spacecraft trying to leave. These nodes are capable of mapping the location of every living thing on a planet, and their weapons can target all of them from orbit with deadly accuracy. This is how the Karrix kill one eighth of Angine's population in the blink of an eye at the beginning of the story, and this can easily be escalated to include everyone if the Carrix wished it. Just a reminder, by the way, Angin has well over 3 billion people living on it. That's 3 billion targets the nodes can destroy in an instant. As a side note, as over the top as this attack, known by the Carrix as Breaking the Limb, is, it actually has a good deal of precedent in real-life military thought. Dan Carlin explains it best in his Hardcore History podcast with a concept he calls logical insanity. It's basically the theory that acts of overwhelming cruelty and terror, things well beyond the scope of typical warfare, like, for example, murdering one-eighth of a planet's population, can have an important place in military strategy and can even, when effective, limit the overall casualty count of a war. That's in no way an endorsement of logical insanity, by the way, nor is it even really a comment on its effectiveness in real life or lack thereof. But anyway, it's Genghis Khan I I've heard it's actually pronounced Genghis and not Genghis, so I'm going to pronounce it that way, just to make you mad. It's Genghis Khan committing unspeakable atrocities and acts of terrorism at one city, so that by the time he rocks up to the next city, they've all heard about the horrible things he's done at the last one and they surrender without a fight. Whether you view logical insanity as having any merit or not, it's clear that the Carrics very much do, and they've made it a cornerstone in their military strategy. And perhaps worst of all, they don't even do their subjects the courtesy of treating these war crimes with the gravity they demand. It's all done with the mathematical detachment with which the Carrix do everything else, and with zero regard for the pain it causes so long as it expedites the domestication process. And it's the nodes who carry out the opening volley of this domestication process. Of this logical insanity. And then, once the nodes have achieved their purpose and a planet has been tamed to the Karyx's satisfaction, they die. They're a lot like certain insect species in that way, who die after they've achieved their purpose of reproducing. There are also species amongst the Carrix ranks that aren't employed strictly for their talent in warfare, like the Sinon. The Sinon have faces that are said to look like a cross between a goat and a cuttlefish, and they're there to perform a lot of the Carrix's more menial or clerical work. You often see them operating excavation tools on newly colonized planets, or serving as hands on Karrix's ships or functionaries on their worlds. A species doesn't even need to be particularly intelligent or talented at a given thing to be useful to the Carrix. It can all boil down to their biology. For example, the Carrics have a race whose bodies just so happen to be really good for filtering and purifying air, and so they've been allowed to live in order to provide that service, and only that service, to the Empire. And even better for them because they never had any ambitions to do anything else anyway, so in this one particular case, the arrangement works out really well for all involved. So, yes, there is an incredible amount of work and expertise the Carrix outsource to their thralls. Each of the species I just listed, and who knows how many more, are organized into moieties, which are presided over by carrics called keeper librarians. These keeper librarians are there to guide their moieties through their new duties to the Empire. It's they who intercede to the Empire at large on behalf of their charges in order to secure any resources or equipment they might need, so long as it doesn't handicap them. The Carrix are not interested in species that need excessive handholding after all. Keeper librarians are incentivized to get the most use out of their moieties by having their fate intertwined with that of their moiety. If its moiety proves useless, then the keeper librarian is in turn judged useless, and well, if you've been paying any attention to what I've been saying about the Karrix's philosophy, then you'll know that is really, really bad news for the keeper librarian. The Karrix believe that any exposure to animals taints them in turn. There's a huge social stigma towards individuals who work with aliens, like soldiers and whatnot, so the keeper librarians try to limit their interactions with their Moides as much as possible. On one hand, this makes for a frustrating lack of guidance for the Moides. For example, addresses from a keeper librarian are often terse and opaque when they're provided at all. But on the other hand, the species that can make it work become that much more self-sufficient, which, again, is exactly what the Karrix want. The space alien version of Darwinism and perfection is never far from the Karick's mind. Any animal death, or indeed Carrick's death, is seen as a net positive for the Empire. Better that the weak elements be excised than be allowed to fester and taint the whole. In fact, in the case of infighting between alien species, the Karrix more often than not reward the ones who brutalize another, whereas the losers are often punished just on the basis of having lost or capituated. The Karrics are also super hostile to any artificial intelligence that imitates life. They see it as a recursive perversion of nature. They claim it lacks any of the adaptation or variety they value in their subjects. But they do make use of these powerful, nonsentient machine intelligences known as half-minds. The characters were careful not to develop them with any emotional capacity or inner lives of their own. At most, a half-mind will experience a kind of detached satisfaction at a job well done. But whatever they feel, the half-minds are the computational backbone of the Empire. They can be found directing everything from the colonization of new worlds to space battles against enemy fleets, they can be worn on the bodies of the empire's various animals so that they can communicate with one another, and crucially, they allow the Karrix to navigate the quote-unquote terrifying improbability of asymmetric space. Now, asymmetric space is what the Karrix use to bypass the speed of light limit. It's this sort of hyperspatial realm where the laws of causality break down. Individuals traveling through it experience memories of things that haven't happened yet. Time seems to stretch and contract and reverse. It's an insanely disorienting and traumatizing ordeal for any organic being, but it's something the logical half-minds are perfectly suited to make sense of. So, in the interest of being able to expand their empire and allow their subjects to understand their will, the Karrix have learned to tolerate limited machine intelligence. Humanity is tossed headlong into this empire without so much as a raft, and the question becomes: will we get our bearings and tread water, or drown thanks to our own panic? It's important to note that the Captives' War was conceptualized in part as a science fiction-y retelling of the Book of Daniel. All of the overwhelming culture shock that Daniel and his companions experience in their captivity in Babylon is alive and well in our little science team from Angene. The foreigners and architecture and court politics of Babylon are mirrored in the aliens and technology and brutal philosophy of the Karyx, and humanity's survival rests on us successfully endearing itself to the spacefaring version of King Nebuchadnezzar. And even then there is a very real question as to the worth of a life spent in bondage and toil. But it's not just the humans that are caught up in this reenactment, and there's a lot more to the universe than just the Carrix, no matter what they would have their animals believe. Because something else gets picked up by the roving Carrix on Angene. An agent inserted amongst the human population by a deathless race that even the Carrix fear. A spy with one mandate, hitcherai with the Carrix's latest victims, and gather whatever intelligence it can on the heart of their empire so that its creators can shatter the Karyx once and for all. We know precious little about this enemy of the Carrix, and only time will tell whether they are ultimately better or worse for the galaxy than the Carrix are. But in the meantime, under the nose of these battling gods, the elite of Angien, including our little science team, are rounded up and put on ships bound for Carrick's space. What follows is a crossing straight out of the most harrowing accounts of the ships of the Atlantic slave trade. It's only after braving the utterly squalid and demeaning conditions of the Carrick's transport that our characters reach their destination. And there, on a strange new planet, they are treated to a vast and inhuman landscape dotted by gigantic zygorat-looking structures, each literally as tall as a mountain. And these ziggurats are themselves dwarfed by these arches that crest well into the lower atmosphere and, if hollow, can easily house the entire population of one of Angin's countries within their confines. Any hope our characters had of returning to their previous lives, not to mention any notion of resistance or rebellion, dies with that first look at the Carrix World Palace. All that's left is to rise to the Carrix's evaluations and see if they can't somehow prove that humanity would better serve them alive than dead. There's nothing left but to get to work. What is, after all, is