The Great Adventure

The Mercy of Gods: Captives War, Book 1. Orbit Books, 2024, 448 pages. Voted Best Book of 2024.

I am a lover of science fiction, and if you haven’t read or seen on TV the classic series The Expanse, you have missed a lot. I picked this book up because (1) it is written by the same author(s) AND (2) they are working on making it another series on Amazon Prime in the near future. Here’s the Amazon summary:

HOW HUMANITY CAME TO THE PLANET CALLED ANJIIN IS LOST IN THE FOG OF HISTORY, BUT THAT HISTORY IS ABOUT TO END.

The Carryx—part empire, part hive—has waged wars of conquest for centuries, destroying or enslaving species across the galaxy in its conflict with an ancient and deathless enemy.

When they descend on the isolated world of Anjiin, the human population is abased, slaughtered, and put in chains. The best and brightest are abducted, taken to the Carryx world-palace to join prisoners from a thousand other species.

Dafyd Alkhor, assistant to a prestigious scientist, is captured along with his team.

Even he doesn’t suspect that his peculiar insight and skills will be the key to seeing past their captors’ terrifying agenda.

Swept up in a conflict beyond his control and vaster than his imagination, Dafyd is poised to become humanity’s champion—and its betrayer.

This is where his story begins.

So that’s the summary. I haven’t been real patient with my books lately and have put many down before completing them. But this one, I am happy to report was very, very good. Good story, good premise, good character development, and most of all, good world building. As the summary above tells you, humans on a colony planet are invaded by an alien race who takes away the cream of the crop, in the case of our story, a biochemistry team. Then they put them to work for them in very alien circumstances.

It’s an ensemble cast, and at first, there’s no real main protagonist, which is a lot like The Expanse was. But you get to know them all as time goes on, and get to care about them, which is what you want, of course. I didn’t feel anything toward the aliens, other than curiosity about how they lived and functioned. They are the villains, after all. So, that’s something to look at.

I would love to give this review a perfect five out of five score, but I can’t, simply because of a couple of factors. I don’t know a lot about biochemistry, which bogged me down a lot in this story. In addition, alien stories with lots of alien races are, well…very alien, which makes reading a lot more difficult. So those two factors slowed down my reading enjoyment a bit.

But it was 448 pages and it went pretty fast; I finished it in about three days. AND…here’s the litmus test…I am ready to go on to book 2. So I give the book 4 1/2 stars.