That’s James S.A. Corey, which is to say Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and their new series The Captive’s War, an in-progress work comprising 2¼ or so novels. The Coreys are of course best-known for their deservedly wildly popular The Expanse series and the subsequent success of the streaming-video version. The new series is… different. If you’re wondering whether or not you should wade in, the following is for you.

Minor and meta spoilers · Don’t worry, you can go on reading this even if you plan to read the books. Here’s a spoiler that has appeared in every public mention of the book, which I’ll give away with a quote from page 102: “I think some important scientific questions have finally been answered. Alien life exists, and they are assholes.” Which is to say, it doesn’t go well for the humans.

Now for the meta-spoilers. The novels are The Mercy of Gods and The Faith of Beasts, then there’s a novella, Livesuit. I found The Mercy of Gods a bit of a grind, and if that’s all I’d read I would have been pretty negative about this project. There is a major, major reveal partway into The Faith of Beasts that changed my whole outlook on the series; it makes the storytelling velocity really pick up. It’s a little annoying that Livesuit was published between the two full novels because it only really makes sense if you’ve finished both of them. So do like I did, and read the novella last.

I have to ask why the Coreys couldn’t have pulled the curtain aside a little earlier on. And while I’m griping, let me add that the sped-up storytelling runs into a big honking cliffhanger ending at high velocity. Harumph.

My take-away · It could go off the rails but if they can maintain their Expanse form, I suspect this series is going to be pretty great. The characters are fun to know and the narrative revolves around the great mother of all trolley-problem ethical challenges, which was not nearly resolved at cliffhanger-ending time.

Those of us who are fussy about the plausibility of future technologies (hey, Charlie Stross) should avert their eyes from the Coreys’ fairly low-effort attempts to explain how the aliens and humans in this story accomplish the things they do. Doesn’t bother me much, though.

Having said all that, this series is not cheerful stuff; I do not recommend it to those who, like many in these troubled times, are having trouble seeing the bright side of, well, anything.

Will I read the next volume? · Yep, no hesitation. And they’ve already started working on a streaming version. I hope they don’t take that back to Amazon Prime any more, because I don’t subscribe any more.