The Mercy of Gods (James S. A. Corey)

The Mercy of Gods
The Captive's War series, Book 1
James S. A. Corey
Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: It was a night of triumph, at least for one small group of elite researchers and students at Dyan Academy on the planet Anjiin... and it was also the beginning of the end of their world. While Tonner and his group celebrate their groundbreaking discovery, reconciling the DNA of native Anjiin life forms with those descended from the long-lost homeworld of the humans, academic politics and rivalries threaten to split the team and the fruits of their labors. But even those matters seem trivial when a peculiar spacial anomaly, only recently detected with another breakthrough project, turns out to be something far less benign than a simple natural phenomenon.
The empire of the Carryx spans countless star systems and encompasses innumerable subjugated species... and those are just the ones that the vaguely insectlike titans find "useful" in their inscrutable minds. Those who are not useful are eliminated with no more thought or remorse than swatting a gnat, and little more effort.
When the Carryx ships descend upon Anjiin, they conquer the planet in under a week. As for the humans, their fate will be decided soon enough. The Carryx take the top talents from around the globe - not just scientists, but politicians, soldiers, artists, and more - back to their home planet, setting each a task at which they must succeed to prove their worth, and the worth of the whole of Anjiin.
As Tonner and the Dyan scholars struggle with the seemingly-impossible job they've been given, Dafyd - always something of an outsider, more a political animal than an academic one - begins to look at his new surroundings in a different way. There must be some uniting philosophy and purpose behind the seemingly random mishmash of alien species he sees around him, something that could unlock the psyche of their Carryx overlords. And if he can figure out what makes their civilization work, he's halfway to figuring out how to tear it all down.

REVIEW: I enjoyed Corey's Expanse series (the books, the TV series, and what little of the extended graphic novel universe I've read), so I was eager to get my hands on their newest sci-fi adventure. While it did deliver a similar grand idea and epic scope, ultimately I didn't connect with the story or the characters in the way I'd hoped to.
The opening sets the stage for the whole book, taking place at a high-end university where top-flight researchers and science students are both celebrating a breakthrough in a complex and esoteric field of study and watching their backs for the knives of rivals. Only Dafyd is an outsider among them, though he's a researcher in his own way, mind geared more toward politics and what drives the people around him (and how they might be manipulated if need be). It's the sort of world I've never had a mind for and never been a part of, and to be honest I wasn't that thrilled about my choice of characters to experience it with. I expect I'd have related a lot more had I been more familiar wit academia, with the sort of obsessive brilliance (and possible mild-to-moderate dysfunction) that drives certain people to extreme bleeding edges of their field and the environment that creates. Around this cast, I could see an intriguing world built by descendants of colonists, one that has adapted in some unusual ways and yet still is alien to this planet that they've called home for generations, long enough that any trace of their extraterrestrial origins (save the knowledge that they were, indeed, from another world) has been lost. It's for this that I kept reading.
Eventually, the invaders make landfall and the story begins to properly take off... after another slow stint during transportation, a stretch where minds are bent to the point of breaking in some cases and where the true nature of their predicament, how utterly helpless and outmatched the humans are against their captors, is driven home. Once on the Carryx homeworld (or a world that's far more home to the aliens than the humans), the tale takes more turns, though it still ultimately centers around science and labwork in a way that kept me at arm's length. Still, there were more "shiny objects" to keep me interested. The many aliens and peculiar, inhuman nature of the world have an old-school sense of wonder (a bit of a throwback vibe, not unlike sci-fi centered on scientists doing science) alongside a certain omnipresent dread. The Carryx and other aliens never feel too human, with their own agendas and psychologies that aren't as one-dimensional as they might seem from the outside, which means that they can never truly be trusted.
Alone of the Dyad scientists, Dafyd works to unravel the secrets of their captors and the other species around him. He hopes that doing so will show him a way out, but it's only when he encounters another enemy of his new keepers - a swarmlike entity sent by another interplanetary species that's fighting the Carryx - that he might finally make some progress... but at a cost he doesn't fully grasp until it's too late to turn back. Meanwhile, the rest of the team slowly become more distinct and interesting, even if they weren't always likable. As they try to complete the task the Carryx set for them, they find themselves beset by innumerable obstacles, from inadequate equipment to meddling outsiders to internal schisms exacerbated by captivity and worsening mental health on all their parts.
The finale wraps up some of the storylines while setting up the greater arc and the next book in the series... a book I'm on the fence about continuing, even knowing that one half of James S. A. Corey (the Daniel Abraham half) tends to write to series arcs and can't therefore necessarily be judged adequately on a single book in a given series. Part of me can't help but be intrigued, though.
There are many things to enjoy and admire in this book. As mentioned, it feels a little like an updated throwback, ideas and science painted on a galactic scale. I did also ultimately appreciate the complicated psyches and drives behind the different characters, human and otherwise. There are also several things that just didn't resonate with me, and even when I appreciated their drives I generally never felt invested in the characters. I think if I were more immersed in academia and the world of university researchers I'd have clicked better with it. As it is, I confess I'm probably just not the real target audience here.

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January Site Update

Is it too late to return the unused portion of 2026 for a refund? The main Brightdreamer Books page has been updated with the month's reviews, including the last audiobooks I'll likely be able to get to for some time. (As for the new job... I'm hoping it just got off on the wrong foot and it'll get better, though I made sure to update my resume in case it doesn't.)

Enjoy!

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Becky Chambers)

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
The Wayfarer series, Book 1
Becky Chambers
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Rosemary used to live in the lap of luxury on Mars, but now has given up everything she ever had to get away from her family and old life, joining the crew of the spacecraft Wayfarer as a clerk. It's a patched-up vessel with a crew as mismatched as its parts, from the eccentric tech Kizzy to her partner Jenks, who has fallen in love with the shipboard AI Lovelace, from Dr. Chef - one of the last members of a species slowly going extinct after a genocidal civil war - to Ohan, a Sianat Pair infected with a Whisperer virus that enables great genius at the cost of a shortened lifespan. There's also an Aandrisk pilot, Sissix, and a grouchy human algaeist, Corbin, managing the fuel vats. Rosemary can't help feeling overwhelmed, given that she's barely set foot off a planet before, but Captain Ashby and the crew (well, most of them, save Corbin) go out of their way to make her feel welcome.
When a new species near the galaxy's core - the Toremi, a highly isolationist and clannish species most known for fighting each other to the death over any disagreement - is granted entry into the Galactic Commons of intelligent races, establishing a new wormhole tunnel will be a critical first step to establishing trade and strong diplomatic ties: a lucrative job for any wormhole-punching vessel. Though humans are still considered lesser members of the Commons, Captain Ashby manages to land the gig for the Wayfarer. It'll be a long standard-year of travel to reach the new world, if a short jump back boring a new wormhole through subspace, and long hauls are the kind of trips to make or break a crew, especially when complicated by pirates, bureaucratic barriers, equipment malfunctions, and dark secrets ripped into the open at the worst possible times.

REVIEW: This is another book with personal significance. The novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate was the first audiobook I listened to at my current job - a job I left as of today, transferring to a new role. (There's a long, irrelevant story behind that...) My new job is less likely to allow for the copious audiobook time that I've grown used to, especially not when I'm still learning the ropes. So, to close out my long stretch of listening, I decided to bookend things with this, another Becky Chambers title. It, too, was enjoyable, if a little light on plot.
This is very much a character-driven tale, to the point where there's not too much else binding the events together save the crew's interactions with each other and a few offworlders encountered along the way. For the most part, these are interesting enough to entertain, as everyone has hidden facets and flaws that provide friction now and again, and they all undergo some growth or challenge along the way. Rosemary, a newcomer to the ship in particular and interstellar travel in general, becomes a convenient way for Chambers to explain her milieu to the reader, though Rosemary is far from helpless or useless, just somewhat naïve. And there is a general story arc involved, if a thin one, as the mixed-species crew of the Wayfarer travels to the homeworld of the newest member of the Galactic Commons... but are these Toremi really ready to join the multitude of starfaring races, when only one clan among them has accepted Galactic Commons membership and is still warring with others of its kind? During the Wayfarer's trip, the crew encounter various ways that different species (and members within species; these are not monolithic cultures) view and interact with each other, and even on their own ship there can be stumbles and misunderstandings. Some of the crewmembers seem unevenly developed, though, and don't quite get a full arc or follow-through even after some revelations and transformative moments. Corbin in particular is a flat, grumbling nobody for far too long, and Kizzy's kooky eccentricity wanders erratically between endearing and annoying. Some of their stopovers along the way also overstay their welcome and plot relevance, though this is very much a book where the journey is far more than half the point. The climax feels rushed, shoehorned in to provide drama, with inadequate buildup on a few points (that I can't get into without spoilers). The ending is reasonably satisfying, but also feels like it's partway through some larger journey... and, from what I can tell from blurbs, it looks like the rest of the series wanders away from the Wayfarer (despite the series being named after the ship), so I'm unlikely to find closure on those fronts if I read on.
Still, for all that I sometimes got a little antsy wishing the story would just get on with things already and stop lingering so long over little moments and philosophical discussions and quirky characters being quirky, I will say I remained interested and entertained for the most part as I listened to it, which was enough to keep The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet at a four-star Good rating. On another day, in another mood, I could see where I might be extra-harsh and trim it a half-star, but not today.

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Greenteeth (Molly O'Neill)

Greenteeth
Molly O'Neill
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: For one thousand years, Jenny Greenteeth has lived in the lake besides the little town of Chipping Appleby, tending the water plants and tidying the lake bed and only eating the occasional interloper. When a witch is thrown into her waters, bound with burning iron, Jenny thinks perhaps she's expected to end the mortal's life quickly... but this woman seems to have true power, and Jenny does not at all like the looks of the priestly figure who tossed the witch to her doom. She rescues Temperance and brings her to her cave beneath the waters. There, the witch tells Jenny of the wicked parson who seems to have bewitched her neighbors, convincing them to turn on her when once they were friendly. Together, Jenny and the witch hatch a plan to strike back... but find something far, far more dangerous than either anticipated within the skin of the holy man, something that could doom the whole country if left unchecked. In desperation, they seek help from Gwyn ap Nuud, king of the high fae and one-time leader of the Wild Hunt, and are charged with three seemingly impossible tasks as the price for his assistance - but if they fail, both mortals and immortals will suffer under the heel of the monstrous Erl King.

REVIEW: "Cozy" fantasy seems to be having a moment these days, and Greenteeth might roughly fall into that category as it focuses on the budding friendship between a not-quite-monstrous monster and a good witch, though in other ways it hearkens back to more traditional fantasies built around quests and elder-day magic that's fading away in an increasingly modern and human-dominated world.
The titular Jenny is a water monster, a green womanlike figure possessing great strength, nigh-immortality, the ability to breathe underwater, and multiple rows of very sharp teeth. "Jenny Greenteeth" is a traditional folklore creature of the British Isles, kin to pixies and hobgoblins, and this particular Jenny has been one so long that she no longer recalls if she had another identity or name. If she even thinks about her past at all, she assumes she was created in the same way that she herself once created a daughter from a drowned human infant. She's a solitary being, keeping her "household" beneath the lake nice and tidy with a pike as a sort-of pet, and she generally doesn't bother the nearby humans, who seem to have forgotten that they even have a lake beast... at least, so it seems, until they rudely drop a witch into her domain. Some twinge of compassion causes her to spare the woman's life, as much as a dislike of the parson who riled up the locals into a froth of anti-witch sentiment. But Jenny is not, and should never be mistaken for, human. She may have empathy and even be capable of kindness, but when need be, or when pushed, she's quite capable of putting her claws and teeth to bloody use; the traditional Jenny Greenteeth isn't known for her vegan diet, after all. Temperance the witch is initially, naturally, terrified, but her despair and anger, plus her determination to get back to her beloved husband and children and get them out of the parson's foul clutches, lead her into what starts as an uneasy truce with Jenny. When Temperance needs special ingredients for a spell as part of her attempted counterstrike against the wicked parson, Jenny calls upon Brackus, a traveling goblin merchant with a trickster streak and a bottomless bag of various goodies. It isn't long before Brackus is drawn deeper into the problem, when it becomes clear that there's a greater supernatural threat embodied in the parson that endangers the magical realm as well as the mundane - and the magical realm is already in trouble, slowly fading as the world ages. Indeed, the faerie king no longer even rides forth as he used to, content to preside over a diminishing court that was once the feared Wild Hunt; even the promise of a quarry like the legendary Erl King is insufficient to stir him from his retirement. Instead, he sets three seemingly-impossible quests out of legend before the trio seeking his aid, and even if they succeed, all he promises is advice, not active help. Still, it's better than nothing, which is what they have when facing the enemy in Chipping Appleby.
As Jenny, Temperance, and Brackus, along with some help from the faerie-touched hound Cavall (on loan from the faerie queen, Lady Creiddylad, who offers more tangible help than the king but is still constrained by his rules), set forth to fulfill the lord's requests, they travel the length and breadth of an elder England, seeing for themselves how magic and the memory of magic has faded in the centuries since Camelot stood. The three clash more than once, but adversity inevitably begets friendship, and Jenny even comes to appreciate Brackus despite his sometimes-irritating optimism.
There are a few points where the personal clashes feel a bit drawn out, as when Jenny and Temperance settle into a feud spurred by a petty misunderstanding that festers out of proportion; this primarily happens to force a plot-relevant event, and struck me as mildly manipulative on the author's part. The ties to Camelot and Arthur become more pronounced as the tale unfolds; it works for the most part, though I sometimes get tired of King Arthur as the inevitable go-to touchstone legend. For the most part, though, it's a fairly satisfying tale, evoking the spirit of questing fairy tales, even though the wrap-up feels slightly too neat and tidy. Being a standalone title helps, as it doesn't ever overstay its welcome or its premise.

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Dragonfruit (Makiia Lucier)

Dragonfruit
Makiia Lucier
Clarion Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Seadragons are the great wonder and wealth of the Nominomi Sea, and the terror of many a ship. Their scales can be fashioned into nigh-impenetrable armor. Their flesh can be rendered into pure oil that burns brighter and cleaner than anything else. A stew made from their eyes can restore lost vigor and youth. Every part of the great beasts is worth at least its weight in gold. But it's their eggs, known as dragonfruit, that are most coveted and rarest seen. Consuming a dragonfruit, the old stories say, can erase one great sorrow from your life... but to do so is to risk the anger of the sea god, who will exact a terrible price. Sometimes, though, for the truly desperate and lost and heartbroken, the risk is worth the reward.
As a girl, Hanalei was a page to the queen of the wealthy Tamarind Islands... and, like the queen, fell victim to a terrible poison that induced a comalike slumber. Three seadragon eggs were brought in the hopes that they could provide a cure. But an accident destroyed two eggs, and Hanalei's father, a loyal soldier, turned traitor and stole the last egg, whisking it and his his stricken daughter away from the Tamarinds. The cure worked, but it cost the father his life, and made them both exiles from their homeland.
Ten years later, Hanalei wanders the Nominomi Sea. She studies the dwindling population of seadragons, selling her sketches and observations to the handful of scholars who want to understand the wonders of the Nominomi, but always the hunters and the foreigners seem to get there first. But she has an advantage they do not; ever since her cure, she has been able to sense the great beasts. Though she tries to keep it secret, one dragoner captain, Bragadin of the Anemone, works it out and takes her captive as he hunts for a gravid seadragon. Passing near the Tamarinds, she takes a chance to escape, even knowing she'll probably be seen as the unwelcome daughter of a traitor. Instead, she finds an old childhood friend, Prince Samahtitamahenele (or Sam), who tells her the queen, his mother, still sleeps her poisoned sleep. When a fresh seadragon nest is found on the island, Hanalei has a chance to undo her late father's mistake and secure a dragonfruit to cure the queen - but others covet the eggs, and the Anemone is still lurking just beyond the boundary stones.

REVIEW: There's plenty to like about Dragonfruit, from its setting - refreshingly non-Eurocentric, based instead on cultures and mythologies of the Pacific Islands - to its dragons. There are also some niggling issues that almost (but not quite) cost it a half-star in the ratings.
The story doesn't drag its feet, opening with the legend of the dragonfruit and the eggs' miraculous powers and establishing its heroine Hanalei and the seadragons, as well as the threat of dragoner crews. Hanalei is a decently pro-active main character, not one prone to freezing up or sinking into useless despair and helplessness, though she isn't above mistakes. Her attempt to save the dragons lands her in the clutches of an old nemesis, Captain Bragadin of the Anemone. As a penniless orphan far from home after her father was killed and his money stolen, she wound up working in his oil processing facilities rendering dead seadragons, earning starvation wages and hands full of silvery scars from the obsidian-sharp scales, until she outgrew the job; small, nimble hands (and young, helpless children) are his preferred workforce on land, while his ship is full of the usual assortment of pirate thugs. He's almost stereotypical in his monstrous behavior, but he's clever enough to have figured out that there's a reason she seems to keep turning up whenever there are seadragons to be slain. So fixated is he on his hunt and the potential reward for a clutch of seadragon eggs that he endangers his entire ship fending off a potential rival. Hanalei manages to escape, only to be forced to confront her past, or rather the wreckage her father left behind while she was comatose from poison... and this is where the story morphs into its main form, after it seemed like it would be about Hanalei and the dragoner captain fighting over the fate of the seadragons and the eggs. (It's not much of a spoiler to say that the Anemone is not entirely out of the picture, but it is shifted to the back burner for a long stretch.)
Sam, for his part, has lived half his life under the shadow of a stricken mother. His grandmother currently wears the crown of the Tamarinds - theirs is a matrilinear culture, power passed from mother to daughter - but cannot rule indefinitely. Unless Sam's mother is cured, and soon, Sam will be expected to marry, a political arrangement to strengthen the islands' stance in a world where foreigners are increasingly intrusive, for all that the spices of the Tamarinds still give them some wealth and leverage. His heart is clearly not in it; he pines for his old childhood friend, for all that he does not think of their bond as love in the popular sense of the term. He also carries his mother's living "mark", a tattoolike animal that sometimes appears spontaneously on the skin of islanders and can become a living creature, something like a familiar, to carry out tasks and provide companionship. The fruit bat is a perpetual reminder of his ailing mother, both a comfort and a further burden. He never even got his year of travel in, an island tradition where men and women leave the Tamarinds for several months as the cross the threshold into adulthood. Unexpectedly finding Hanalei fleeing a dragoner ship right on his metaphoric doorstep is a surprise that brings up all sorts of complicated emotions, not to mention all sorts of problems. The names of her and her father are still raw wounds to many on the Tamarinds, particularly the noble houses who still bear the brunt of the man's decision to snatch away the queen's potential cure to save his own daughter; the fact that Hanalei was evidently cured, indicating that the queen, too, would've likely recovered if she'd received the egg instead, makes her return all the more painful. But bonds of family and love are deep and complicated... especially when Hanalei's return coincides with a potential new seadragon nest on the island, and thus a chance to atone for her father's selfish act. Her ability to sense the dragons themselves gives the islanders a slight advantage in tracking down the eggs, but there are many people who feel desperate for their own miracle, and thus many potential traitors... in theory.
Now we get to the parts that almost weighed the ratings down. The baddies and the shifty characters turn out to be far, far too obvious from their first appearances, to the point where it gets hard to believe that nobody in the cast even remotely suspects them. This doesn't just apply to the dragoner crew and foreigners, but to people that the characters know (theoretically) well on the island. There's also a sense of blunted corners and pulled punches that almost feels more like what one would find in a younger middle-grade novel, and some elements that are brought up and then completely dropped without followthrough or fleshing out. (Even the "romance", such as it is, is so mild that I wondered at the original target audience, if it was "aged up" for marketing reasons for a story aimed younger. Not that every teen book needs to drip with hormones, mind you, but something about just felt odd.) With that sense of bubble-wrapping comes a hint of "plot armor" where it becomes impossible to consider that any serious harm or inconvenience will ultimately hinder the main characters. (And, yes, that's not entirely uncommon, but it just seemed a little more obvious than it should've been, in the same way that one intellectually knows a movie isn't reality but it's harder to suspend disbelief when the boom mic keeps dropping into the frame. I kept seeing the boom mic here.)
Those issues aside, the story does move well, and I generally enjoyed it. It has many nice details and scenes that bring the islands and their unique magic to life. It's also a standalone, which is refreshing when so many books are series these days. I ultimately liked it enough to keep the rating afloat at four stars, though I'll admit it came close to dropping more than once.

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