When Leviathan Falls hit 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 M.
