The Expanse’s James S.A. Corey returns with The Mercy of Gods — and you can read the first chapter
When Leviathan Fallshit bookstores in November 2021, James S.A. Corey — aka authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck — made it very clear to Polygon: The Expanse series was over. Fans could be sad, but not really blame them; after 10 years, well over 5,000 pages, and a hit Syfy/Prime Video TV adaptation, a universe had been effectively spun. The duo had “told the story [they] wanted to tell.” There were new sagas to write, though — as evidenced by The Mercy of Gods.
The first in a new series, the Captive’s War trilogy, Corey’s The Mercy of Gods tells the story of an alien invasion, the enslavement of a human population, and a scientist’s assistant, Dafyd Alkhor, who stumbles into a deeper mystery. During a recent virtual event, Franck cheekily described the book as “the disappointing love child of Frank Herbert and Ursula Le Guin,” while Abraham said it was a total departure from the types of stories they were able to tell in the Expanse series. “It’s the story of living as a slave in a totalitarian regime,” he said. “How you stay true to — and even discover — yourself, how you compromise, how you serve the regime and how you can undermine it.”
Like Dune, Franck said, the timeline supporting the Captive’s War trilogy goes back thousands and thousands of years, and seismic events that reshaped the universe are mere notes in a textbook to the players involved in the core drama. And it starts here: Read on for the entire first chapter of The Mercy of Gods, which arrives this August.
Later, at the end of things, Dafyd would be amazed at how many of the critical choices in his life seemed small at the time. How many overwhelming problems had, with the distance of time, proved trivial. Even when he sensed the gravity of a situation, he often attributed it to the wrong things. He dreaded going to the end-of-year celebration at the Scholar’s Common that last time. But not, as it turned out, for any of the reasons that actually mattered.
“You biologists are always looking for
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