Jake Casella Brookins
After the explosive interstellar action of The Expanse, S.A. Corey’s newest novel, The Mercy of Gods, begins quietly enough: university politics, a successful research group jockeying for funding, subdued interpersonal drama. It’s not long before the action and the stakes rise dramatically, but that initial framing, and the longer plot structure the novel sets up, make for an uneasy allegory of collaboration and resistance. It’s an enjoyable, even a classic science fiction thriller, built around high-tension moral situations and subterfuge; it left me wondering whether, when we fantasize about effecting change by working for the enemy, we’re merely indulging in escapism or rehearsing denial—trying out rationalizations for our own complicities.
Initially set on Anjiin, a planet settled by humans so long ago that there’s no record of its founding, the novel follows a team of scientists who have just made a field-altering breakthrough in biochemistry. It’s a well-drawn cast of characters, but the most significant will turn out to be the junior assistant Dafyd Alkhor—an ambitious and savvy player who’s recognized early on as more of an administrator than a scientist. The organizational and interpersonal plots that the novel seems to be developing come to a screeching halt, however, when Anjiin is suddenly occupied by a powerful alien society, the Carryx, and Alkhor and his colleagues are whisked away and pressed into service for the enemy. As a resistance movement grows among the surviving human captives, Alkhor finds himself having to make cold-blooded, long-term decisions: whether to aid the doomed rebellion now, or sell them out to secure his own position for a more effective resistance at some point in the future. Corey telegraphs Alkhor’s ultimate choice pretty early in the novel.
There’s much in The Mercy of Gods that will appeal to fans of The Expanse: its mix of giant scale and tight personal stakes, its plucky characters up against impossible odds, and its sense of wonder at big science-fictional concepts. One of the great strengths of The Expanse is how that series draws on and remixes early science fiction; here, Iain M. Banks’ Culture and David Brin’s Uplift books were never far from my mind, with their vast interstellar conflicts and delightfully alien aliens—also, perhaps a bit more obscure, William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters, an enchanting semi-comic novel about an invasion of enormous and technologically superior aliens. The alien society that our human characters are trapped within is often horrific, an ultra-Darwinist dystopia where life has little value, but it’s exuberantly and fantastically described, with the huge, mantis shrimp-like Carryx surrounded by dozens of outlandish species. (If, in the Carryx, Corey is setting up a fairly subtle “Jordan Peterson’s badly-informed lobster metaphors are brought low by actual academics” plot, then I really do have to applaud.)
Comparing this novel to Leviathan Wakes and its sequels, there are two weaknesses that jump out. One is that The Mercy of Gods hasn’t yet caught the interpersonal lightning-in-a-bottle that makes The Expanse so enjoyable on a character level. The other is more complicated: setting the novel in a far-future diaspora where humanity doesn’t even remember Earth allows Corey something of a clean slate on which to sketch out big moral questions, but it also hamstrings the novel culturally. With almost no cultural details, either real or invented, the human characters here wind up with a kind of vaguely American blandness; they feel unrooted even before they’re literally abducted.
I don’t like evaluating books based on what might come next, but to be fair it is worth pointing out that this novel heavily signifies itself as the beginning of a new series, and that Corey has a pretty remarkable track record in terms of novel output. There’s certainly reason to think Corey will fill out the gaps or shortfalls in The Mercy of Gods in the next novel or ten. Structurally, it is a bit odd how much the plot and meaning of this novel leans on future installments—we’re frequently given excerpts from “future” histories, in which the Carryx bemoan their eventual downfall at the hands of, presumably, this novel’s protagonist. It’s quite a bit like how Frank Herbert gives glimpses of the longer arc in Dune and its sequels—“foreshadowing” doesn’t seem like quite the right word for it—and kind of remarkable how much it shapes the stakes of the present novel. Without these assurances that Alkhor will eventually succeed, The Mercy of Gods would be a far bleaker story, and Alkhor less a morally gray character than a straight-up villain.
Because, if it’s a little odd that the novel begins as a campus novel, what’s weirder—and perhaps not immediately obvious—is that it remains one. They might be prisoners of a vast alien empire, but the human characters remain academics—navigating research goals, crafting laboratory schedules, requisitioning office supplies. And it’s partly that collegiate framing, strange alien threats and settings notwithstanding, that leaves me feeling very uneasy about the ethical and political resonances of The Mercy of Gods. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is the story of an academic institution fully captured by a genocidal, colonial war-machine, and the brave administrator who betrays those fighting back.
That specific reading, mapping so neatly onto recent campus politics, is almost certainly unintended, if still a bit damning. More broadly, what I’ve found myself ruminating on with this novel is the idea of destroying an empire—eventually, secretly, from within. It sounds great! It makes for an exciting plot! Is it…ever a thing that happens?
The last decade has seen a wave of anti-imperialist speculative fiction—novels and short stories overtly concerned with systems and how to destroy them, or at least reform them. There’s the cathartic, literally world-shattering violence of N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy; the complex, bodily-political intrigue of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series; the mathematical space-magic and revenge-driven revolutions of Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire. We can even fit the gentle reform fantasy of Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor in this trend, perhaps a bit skeptically. And while none of these are instruction manuals to be ranked on effectiveness, there is something deeply laudable about the very range and repetition of the anti-imperial theme. We, we humans, are in a moment where we really need to grapple with the huge, hugely complicated, hugely powerful systems that we’re caught in. We need to dismantle and reorder them—for a more just world, and for a survivable one. Even if speculative fiction about revolution and resistance is of limited use practically, just focusing our attention, firing up our moral imagination, seems deeply worthwhile.
And that gives me pause when I read about a “resistance” that relies on both a wholly consequentialist ethic—only the ends could justify Alkhor’s means; barely the ends—and, maybe more significantly, a model of resistance that is cartoonishly ahistorical and unlikely. Whatever hope one might have for the series, it’s going to be hard for it to avoid falling into traps of “hard men make hard decisions” and the “victim hero” morality of Ender’s Game. With its long con setup—layers of deceptions, a genius double-agent plotting to destroy an empire from the inside—The Mercy of Gods strongly recalls Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, a fantasy novel about a woman who goes to work for the empire that devoured her home culture, planning to eventually destroy them. Somehow. Like Baru, The Mercy of Gods uses that situation to good effect: the angst and melodrama of a well-meaning character forced to horrific acts to maintain their deep cover. But, in a reality where we are, all of us, to some degree or another, complicit with destructive forces—what imaginative muscles, exactly, are we flexing in this fantasy of clever subterfuge and plans within plans? (It’s worth mentioning, if only in passing, that Dickinson’s latest novel, Exordia, is concerned with many of these same questions, but with a biting cynicism about these kinds of trolley problems and game-theory rationalizations; Exordia features militarily superior aliens with some interesting parallels to The Mercy of Gods’, but it is also deeply, consequentially rooted in Earthly politics and history.)
Way back—so long ago—in 2020, Anne Applebaum wrote a brilliant article on “The Collaborators” for the Atlantic, tracing thematic connections and shared psychologies in Nazi-occupied Europe, in the Cold War era Soviet Bloc, and in America’s Republican party under Donald Trump. While acknowledging that collaboration is so common that it’s easier, schematically, to study what makes people resist instead, and while noting that the reasons and rationalities for collaboration are multifarious, Applebaum to draws out some useful typologies of collusion. The most insidious among them is not fear, or greed, but the idea that, somehow or other, helping the enemy—the cause I oppose, the politician I detest—is actually the right thing to do, that some future act of reform or resistance will outweigh the work being done in the present, that merely dragging one’s feet or blocking the appointment of a more zealous villain makes one a hero. It’s a weird but understandable fantasy, and it’s disconcerting to see it imaginatively fleshed out in speculative fiction.
That insidiously “good” collaborator mindset is perfectly encapsulated in A.T. Greenblatt’s “Mindfulness and the Machine,” in which the protagonist tries to minimize the damage done by a mechanical dragon which “cannot be stopped, cannot be rerouted from its stubborn path, only nudged and inched onto a less disastrous course.” Tries from the inside, by helping the machine, by working in and for it. I’d like to read this story as satire, but I don’t think it is: it comes across as fairly straight apologetics. This is a rationale for anyone working in tech, in weapons manufacturing, in the military or government branches involved in obvious atrocities: it would be worse if I left. Or: my replacement would be worse. Or: I can make it better, someday. But the point of a system is what it does; if it’s our shoulder to the wheel, however reluctantly applied, then we can’t absolve ourselves of what, of who, it crushes.
I realize I’m putting a lot on The Mercy of Gods, all because Corey selected a plot well-designed to produce lots of morally and emotionally charged scenarios. But the question of complicity in speculative fiction is one that’s often on my mind, and one that the field would benefit from considering more rigorously. Even restricting our discussion to SF’s relationships to military-imperial projects, there’s a lot to unpack, historically and in the present day, from Cordwainer Smith’s instrumentality in designing psychological warfare programs to the many SF writers who endorsed and promoted the Vietnam War. There’s a long and under-discussed history of militaries hiring science fiction authors to create thought experiments and recruitment material and, ever since the fiasco of the Hugo Awards being (temporarily) sponsored by the infamous weapons manufacturer Raytheon, there’s been an ongoing, often painfully humorous conversation within the field about which authors and fans work for the “defense industry” (a delightfully obfuscating euphemism for an industry that makes drones with names like “Predator” and “Reaper”—sounds very defensive!) and related tech companies.
In discussing sociopolitical science fiction, it behooves us to beware metastasizing Omelas takes: we don’t need to read every dystopia, every problematic utopia, as offering the solution to society’s ills, or as challenging us to come up with one. When it comes to questions of working for a blatantly evil company, or of helping an evil empire carry out some horror, it’s useful to remember that Le Guin put the main solution right in the title: if you can, walk away. It may not be easy, it may not slow the machine much, but it means something to withdraw what you can of your support. As something of an upbeat rejoinder to the perpetually-relevant “The Dead Flag Blues,” I’ve been trying to keep AJJ’s “Death Machine” close to mind. Yes, we’re trapped in the belly of the machine; no, it doesn’t matter who’s steering; and yes, it’s going to keep on killing—but only until we find a way to break the routine. It’s hard to make entertaining plots out of it, maybe, but there’s a lot that’s inspiring in the long history of breaking the routine to fight something awful—in work stoppages, in walkouts, in unions and dockworkers refusing to load weapons for a genocide.
Applebaum’s piece on collaborators draws on Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind—a brilliant study of resistance and collaboration in postwar Poland. Miłosz, she notes, “is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.” That idea of pleasure in conformity, specifically in the face of moral atrocity, is one that has been haunting me since I read it. To be clear, I think speculative fiction, like art generally, should be able to entertain, to give us an escape. There is great value in laughter, in hope, even in terrible times. But, in darker moods, looking at all the discussions of cozy science fiction, cozy fantasy, even—somehow, supposedly—cozy horror, I find myself feeling pretty bleak. Some of these escapes are, undoubtedly, rebellions in their way, refusals to despair, a bit of respite. And others are, undoubtedly, the comfort of collaboration, only possible by denying the horrors they, and we, are complicit in.
I don’t know how to tell them apart. But, whatever else it is, The Mercy of Gods isn’t cozy; the fantasy and the comfort it offers are of another kind entirely. We are promised the end, somehow or other, of an evil empire, and that’s well and good. But the means here should matter, as well as the ends. There are glimmers of alliance and solidarity—a spy from another culture fighting the Carryx is key to Alkhor’s decision—but only glimmers. I’m not sure there can be a revenge deep enough to make up for what the imperial machine tricks us into doing for it—to others, and to ourselves.