I never got into the show The Expanse though I was curious from the buzz and the set pictures. I think I watched two episodes and it just didn’t quite get my attention. I tried the first book that the Prime show is based on, and while it was fine, I also wasn’t in a rush to get back to it, and now it’s been so long, I don’t think I could even pick the series up without a reread. And yet, I wanted to engage with these incredibly beloved sci-fi authors so I was excited when I realized they had a new series I could start right from the get go. I really enjoyed The Mercy of Gods when I read it over a year ago but figured I should read this novella to jog my memory and make sure I had all the context before getting to recently released second novel.
It was a really interesting and ultimately creepy story but I have no idea how this is going to connect to the storyline of The Mercy of Gods (well, technically there is one possibility I see but it’s kind of a reach). That took place on one planet, humans were quickly and unceremoniously conquered, and shipped to an alien facility to prove their worth. Meanwhile, this is a universe where humans have seemingly colonized across multiple planets and solar systems and are engaged in a war with some alien threat.
It actually reminded me of novels like The Light Brigade (Kameron Hurley) or Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, with people/volunteers completely removed from their former lives, going from jump to jump or mission to mission while also every once in a while noticing that maybe something is just a little bit off.
Also, in this novella, the soldiers are in these permanent mech suit set ups that are incredibly advanced but also still require a human operator. With the AI of it all at the moment, this quote especially stood out from the in-brief of the new volunteers: “What I care is that you each have a lump of electrified fat in your skull that can act like a general-purpose problem-solving engine with a response time we can’t build elsewhere without making the problems real easy. Real easy problems are for drones and automated systems. Tricky problems are for you.”
