(warning: spoilers ahead for the first two works in this series, The Mercy of Gods and Livesuit)
In book one of James S. A. Corey’s Captive’s War series, The Mercy of Gods (2024), the human-populated planet Anjiin was invaded and subsumed within the brutal, ever-expanding Carryx Empire, which also removed a group of the “best and brightest” humans to the Carryx homeworld where they would be tested to see if they could be “of use” to the Empire (failure means extinction). By the end, the humans had proven their utility and thus evaded genocide, at least for the time being—utility, after all, must be constantly demonstrated. Now, in the second novel The Faith of Beasts (a novella, Livesuit [2025], came out between the two longer works), we see what taking their place amongst a host of other enslaved species toiling for the Empire might entail for these stand-out specimens.
Whereas in book one all the action and group dynamics after the initial invasion took place in the “testing area” on the Carryx’s planet, in The Faith of Beasts the main group is divided and scattered amongst different settings. Most of the several thousand humans taken from Anjiin remain on the central planet, tasked with continued scientific work for the Carryx, as well as finding a way to feed and house themselves and attain a “sustainable breeding population.” This group is led by Dafyd Alkhor, chosen by the Carryx at the end of the first book to act as the sole liaison between the humans and their Carryx overseer. Also returning from book one amongst the planetside humans are Tonner, the brilliant scientist who has his own personal reasons to resent Dafyd, and the Swarm—a spy/weapon created by the “deathless enemy” with whom the Carryx have been waging a millennium-long war. The Swarm infiltrated the group via its ability to possess a human body, “eating” and retaining its host’s personality and memories. Since that meant (sort of kind of—it’s complicated) killing Dafyd’s lover, the Swarm and Dafyd have some issues to sort out.
Meanwhile, others from The Mercy of Gods have been assigned tasks off planet. Jessyn, a researcher who lives with mental illness and had “spent long periods of her life being fragile, treating herself like she was fragile,” is sent with a group to survey a recently captured planet to learn more about the mysterious enemy. Her fellow researchers Rickar and Campar have been assigned to a fleet about to engage the foe in space battle, each facing their trauma in different ways, Campar via humor, with middling success, and Rickar with a fatalistic resignation: “the tension of knowing that he could die any moment for no reason always at odds with the thought that, if he did, at least it would be over.” In addition to chapters following each of the above’s points of view, we also get a few sections focusing on one of the higher-up Carryx—Surur, regulator-librarian to the “Sovran” (think the Queen of the quasi-hive structure of the Carryx)—and some interspersed sections retelling an origin myth from Anjiin.
On the surface, The Captive’s War seems like the typical “fight the oppressors” story. We’ve been well trained in how to read resistance tales in which a band of plucky underdogs overcome all their built-in disadvantages and—by dint of grit, ingenuity, and dogged spirit (particularly in sci-fi, that exceptionally dogged human spirit)—end up defeating their opponent, whether it be a bigger, stronger, better-resourced sports team; a bigger, stronger, better-resourced invading bunch of Nazis/communists/terrorists; or a bigger, stronger, better-resourced alien race (who apparently forgot to update their anti-malware program). But that’s not the story we get here.
There’s a moment in the book when Jessyn is discussing with another enslaved human their findings on the planet they’re tasked with surveying:
“Plants that look like plants is interesting though, no? I mean, wouldn’t you expect something different?”
“It says more about what kinds of pressures they’re under than anything about the organism […] An environment tells you how to live it.”
While they’re discussing how similar the vegetation is to that with which they are familiar, that last line could just as easily be about the novel’s characters as its plants. The Carryx Empire—with its nonchalant attitude toward genocide, its potential for sudden violence and death embedded within every action or inaction, and its constant requirement for every individual to prove their worth—provides both the pressure under which the humans live and the environment which tells them how to shape and adapt themselves in order to be able to live in it.
The person best able to hear and understand what the environment is saying is Dafyd, due to his preternatural understanding of power relationships—and also because he is the only one in contact with the Carryx via their overseer. (The rest of the Carryx do not lower themselves to deal with “animals.”) And what Dafyd is learning is that this is not a time to go out in a blaze of glory, but a time for letting the fire die and using the ashes for camouflage amid the shadows: a time for quiet patience rather than immediate roaring defiance; to put away the pluck, the indomitable untamable human spirit, and the inspirational acts of valiant futility. Because, as I noted in an earlier review elsewhere of The Mercy of Gods, this is not a resistance story; it is a survival story. And therefore, I’d argue, a more richly interesting one.
I can’t say Dafyd as a person is particularly compelling, but his situation certainly is. Part of this is born out of the knife-thin line he walks—compliant on the surface while playing a long game of resistance known to only a few of his companions. He is despised as an “animal” by the Carryx and as a “traitor” by the humans, even as he must navigate amongst, and negotiate with, both groups. This is a fraught position whose tension and suspense is heightened by incomplete knowledge about or within these two groups.
With the Carryx, while Dafyd makes some strides in understanding them, particularly how they will react to defiance or simple failure, they remain … well, alien. Sometimes this means he errs in his strategizing thanks to a faulty premise (this happens, for instance, in the case of his plans based on his flawed reading of their hive-based structure). Other times, because his knowledge of the Carryx is flawed yet greater than that of his fellow humans, when he acts on that knowledge to protect them, their ignorance of his motivation leads to anger at his choice to side with the oppressors and against his fellow humans, who are naturally resistant to captivity and have been raised on the same stories of heroic battles against the odds that we have. Meanwhile, their resentment goes unmollified thanks to Dafyd’s concealment of his under-the-radar, long-term resistance, the hope-inspiring knowledge that the Carryx are fighting a tough war against some unknown enemy—and, even better, that an agent of that enemy, the Swarm, is amongst them and working as an ally.
This omnidirectional peril creates a constant sense of tension in his scenes. At any given moment, it’s easy to see him getting killed by the Carryx for some cross-species misunderstanding or because they learned of his hidden defiance; getting killed by the humans, either directly for his appeasement and role in other humans being killed by the Carryx or indirectly after they do something stupid to which the Carryx have to respond; or simply dropping dead due to the toll all this is taking on him (his haggard, worsening appearance is remarked upon multiple times by other characters). Throw in an unexpected revelation regarding another enslaved species playing their own long game of hidden resistance—which leads to some co-plotting (yet another action that if discovered could get him killed)—a risky spy mission with the Swarm, his discovery of how the Swarm actually possesses bodies, several deaths that show the authors are willing to kill off characters, and even a potentially disastrous union-management dispute (I kid you not), and you can’t help but feel for the guy.
Equally interesting is how he chooses to wage his war. Dafyd thinks in multi-generational terms, as opposed to a “live today so we can rebel next month” timeline. Because he knows any actual resistance needs to take place far down the road, he recognizes that those humans potentially rebelling will be fundamentally different than himself and his companions, a process he realizes is well on its way when he catches himself referring to the Carryx planet as “home.” As he tells one of his very few confidantes: “They’re not going to know anything but Carryx rule. All this? It’s going to be normal to them. It’s going to be how they grew up. They won’t know Anjiin. They won’t have any idea how we used to live.” What, then, will they be fighting for? Why would they even fight? Beyond the obvious death and loss, this is one of the most traumatic consequences of colonization and forced removal: the loss not just of home but the idea of what home is; the loss not just of community, but what it was that bound that community together; the loss not just of a past, but of the shared future born out of the seeds of a shared past.
The way through, Dafyd decides, is via story, not an unexpected choice of weapon coming from a pair of writers:
I need stories. I need songs about how we might suffer now, but that we’ll get justice in the end. About how servants can get power over time—how they turn invisible. Stories about saying the right things, doing the right things, playing the right part up until the moment comes. And then throwing off the mask and fighting. […] so solid that even if they don’t understand now, even if they forget, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren can find the meanings waiting for them in there.
This to me is a far more interesting solution than McGyvering/McClaining something to make a bigger boom than one’s much more powerful enemies can make.
Also more interesting to me is the multi-layered way in which identity and individuality play out through the course of the book. By trying to preserve human/Anjiin identity within an environment that requires that identity to be subsumed within the Carryx one, he requires his fellow humans to act in non-human ways, just as he has to resort to methods that seem to set him outside the human community. At what point do you become that which you pretend to be? Later, in an episode that would require spoilers to unpack, there’s also a fascinating non-human example of this theme—a sure sign the novel means us to spot it.
On a more personal level, the Swarm also exemplifies this same dilemma. Carrying within it the full memories, as well as the voices and personalities, of those it has possessed, the Swarm struggles with how to define itself, or even with whether it even has/is a “self.” Are they a disparate collection of individuals acting as a council of sorts, a kind of superorganism? Are they a singular sum of those individuals’ experiences, just as we are the sum of our own memories and experiences and interactions? Are they a whole greater than the parts or something wholly different? Are they even, as, per above, who they are or who they pretend they are? And if they can be everyone, can they be anyone? This abstract and existential question is, in the true fashion of speculative fiction, literalized and grounded in how the Swarm can reshape its physical body at will. This also moves the motif from an analogy for the humans’ predicament to an analogue for the Carryx as well. They, too, can reshape their body—can become the “person” they need to be to fulfill a task; they, too, are an individual within a superorganism structure, a quasi-hive mind/society; and they, too, in the form of an expanding empire, have consumed those who are utterly different from them. Can they truly obliterate “the Other” within them without effect, or does the presence of “the Other” change who the Carryx are? (We have at least a partial answer to that question, since we know from book one—via passages told from the POV of a future Carryx writer—that they brought the seeds of their own downfall into the Empire themselves.)
A half-step removed from this theme of discovering who one is, we also explore the idea of discovering who one has become thanks to the effects of trauma. This is not a series in which horrible events occur and then are quickly forgotten as we move on to the next plot point. These characters, and thus the reader, are never far removed from their trauma. The most obvious moments are those in which characters are once again facing the possibility of death and destruction, as with Campar on the warship about to go into battle:
He would have thought he’d get better at losing everything. At the universe treating him like a seed on the wind […] Or maybe it was that being at the mercy of a cruel and indifferent universe could only be a surprise once. Every time after the first, profound loss of innocence was just an echo, a reminder of that first loss.
At other times, the trigger comes out of a stressful moment but a surprisingly mundane one, as when Tonner muses after losing control:
Since the day the Carryx had come to Anjiin, Tonner had been carrying an oceanic fear in his belly […] It fucked you up. Sure, you woke up from nightmares every few days. Sure, you agreed to make children for your masters despite the fact that most of your life what you’re doing would have been monstrously criminal. But Tonner could keep that down, swallow it. Bring up his dead ex-partner over lunch salad, though, and boom. Stress levels through the fucking roof […] It was ridiculous.
And sometimes, it sneaks up on you in moments of peace, as when Jessyn has a rare moment of being outdoors and also alone:
The clouds shifted, moving too slowly to see the changes but changing all the same. She could relate to that. She wasn’t remotely who she’d been before, and while she had noticed the more dramatic, violent transformations when they’d happened, there were others—deeper ones, she thought—that had come over her too slowly to notice […]
What allows them to keep going are those moments, fleeting though they may be, of connection. Jessyn and Garral, a fellow human also on the survey mission. Campar and the lover he finds aboard the warship. The humans on the Carryx homeworld who are there to hold the first babies born from artificial wombs. Nor is it just human contact. Campar finds a human lover, yes, but he and Rickar also form a close friendship with the alien Vaudai, a “massive slug.” Even the Swarm, whatever it is, looks forward to “a chance, however slim, however fragile, to be loved.” As Campar says to his lover in a passage that, yes, is about characters on a spaceship surrounded by alien creatures in some far-flung galaxy, but serves equally well as a description of our day-to-day existence here on Earth:
“We are in a ship we don’t control, on a mission we don’t understand, and every now and then, someone tries to kill us […] It’s overwhelming. But we live through it, and there’s more unexpected things on the other side […] We can live through this …”
“Why do you want to? […]”
“In the hope I’ll be pleasantly surprised … You were a wonderfully pleasant surprise.”
It seems such a small reason to live, a sense made stronger by the deliberate mundanity and repetitiveness of the language: “pleasant.” No elevated language or lyricism. No earth-shattering event. Is there a more trivial reason to live than to be “pleasantly surprised”?
Is there any better?