When James S. A. Corey, the pseudonym for the combined brilliance of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck of Expanse fame, announced a new space opera in 2024, I couldn’t have been more excited. The Expanse was an incredible monument to science fiction greatness, with nine books, all of them fantastic. So, when I read Mercy of the Gods and came away entertained but somewhat underwhelmed, I decided to look forward to book two in The Captive’s War. The second entry, The Faith of Beasts, will be released in just a few weeks. Will it recapture that bottled lightning and blow away fans and critics alike?
The Captive’s War departs from the self-contained style of The Expanse in favor of a much bigger story that fully stretches between novels. The Faith of Beasts picks up right where Mercy of the Gods left off, and it uses the strong ending point of book one as a jumping-off point to build a much faster pace, higher stakes, and clearer thematic execution. Gods had a lot of worldbuilding and foundation laying in its first half that dragged on the plot and lacked the fiery excitement of most other Corey novels. However, having now read Beasts, I think the payoff is worth it, and the larger narrative is much stronger having taken the time to establish those stakes in book one.
For those of you unfamiliar with those said stakes, here’s a spoiler-free plot summary of this series: Our central character is Dafyd Alkhor, a lab assistant with a penchant for reading people. We follow a team of elite scientists in a human world of scientific progress, when their world is swiftly and completely occupied by The Carryx. The Carryx have succeeded in the galactic conquest by efficiently assessing each species they come across as potential game pieces or obstacles to be discarded. The Carryx have built a society completely devoted to utilitarianism, conquest, and violence, and it is up to the humans to figure out how to survive in their new, horrible reality as cogs in the empire. In book two, our cast of scientists is no longer confined to the Carryx assessing zones and starts to get spread across the Empire to do its bidding. Each new zone a scientist is sent to reveal a new piece in the puzzle of how these aliens think and the foundations that support their culture. Slowly, without ever tipping their hands, these brilliant human individuals must find ways to bring down their conquerors, a task that feels beyond any imaginable possibility.
Corey has always been a character-focused writer, but Beasts takes that focus to a new height by lasering in on a specific character element and then exploring it in a rainbow of personalities with subtle differences. At a macro level, we have a number of extremely smart, confident, and academic leaders who are all suddenly and viciously subjected to an intense form of captivity and slavery. It forms a very specific, yet kaleidoscopic, cauldron of personal drama that warps and reforms each of the minds it touches.
The individuals of Beasts are brilliant. Corey has built a cast that feels genuinely top of the intellectual food chain, and this is reflected in many characters’ rampant arrogance and highly individualistic nature. For many, captivity only heightens their frictionful personalities. Some find newfound strength and purpose and learn to live stressful double lives without breaking a sweat. Others are horrified to learn that for all their lofty smarts, they have a hollow core and are unable to make the awful sacrifices necessary to play the long game against such an unrelenting and overwhelming enemy. This hyperfocus left me in a state of two minds. On the one hand, I am not a big fan of capture/slavery stories. They tend to be pots of misery stew without a lot of variation in theme or plot points, and I struggle to maintain momentum in stories that are just a continuous firehose of suffering. On the other hand, Corey appears to be working overtime to explore new areas of the subject in ways that left me constantly surprised and curious to see where the characters would go next. Several of the tired solutions to captive stories I had read ad nauseam were rounded up and summarily executed in the second installment, and I found myself constantly asking, “Well, fuck, where is this going?”
In the end, The Faith of Beasts was extremely engrossing, keeping my mind extremely busy until the last page. I think my initial read of Mercy of the Gods suffered from an unconscious desire and expectation that I get The Expanse V2, but Corey has shown that they are going in a very different direction with this new series and that it is worthy of its own independent considerations. It is still a firehouse of suffering, but I can’t look away from the intricate rainbows made from the water bouncing off me as it pummels my flesh.
Rating: The Faith of Beasts – 9.0/10
-Andrew
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
