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Cover of Saint Death's Herald by C.S.E. Cooney, featuring a woman's face (silhouetted, black) dwarfed by her large coiffure that contains plants, animals, bones, crystals, and more, against a yellow background.
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Book Review: Saint Death’s Herald by C.S.E. Cooney

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Those who haven’t yet read the 2023 World Fantasy Award winning novel Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney should correct their omission as soon as feasible. It’s a story that took me by surprise, equally startling and delightful. The novel starts out with all the hallmarks of a coming-of-age dark fantasy with a complex, gothic world-building that invokes vibes of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tombs series. Its plot and its young protagonist Miscellaneous (Lanie) Stones could suggest a YA novel emphasis and expectations, but the writing proceeds to reveal an intermingling of classification and styles to create a voice that is just captivating. There are serious moments of violence and raw emotion alongside lighter moments of playful wit alongside academic footnote asides. The trajectory of the novel also shifts multiple times, in multiple ways expertly guiding readers from expectations and transcending Saint Death’s Daughter beyond a typical coming-of-age fantasy. Cooney accomplishes this so well through both the rich world-building and characterization. It’s therefore an understatement to say that the novel’s sequel was highly anticipated by fans, including myself. Out now, Saint Death’s Herald may not surprise or pull readers through turns like the first novel did, but it should still delight readers as a compelling continuation of Lanie’s story that expands the folkloric elements of this universe and widens readers’ insight into characters. Saint Death’s Herald begins just following the conclusion of the first novel, with Lanie in pursuit of Irradiant Stones (Grandpa Rad), whose ghost has taken over the body of Cracchen Skrathmandan and is headed toward the icy realm of Skakhmat to continue his search for power that led to his death there ages ago. Along with her St. Death-blessed magic, Lanie has the loyal were-falcon Duantri (as well as Stripes the reanimated tiger-rug) at her side to stop Grandpa Rad from enacting the further genocide necessary to achieve his goals. From page one Cooney sets up Saint Death’s Herald as similar, but quite distinct from the first novel. The compelling voice mixing light- and heavy-hearted moments remains, but Cooney replaces the slowly building coming-of-age framework with a quick-moving Hero’s Quest structure that doesn’t let up until a brief mid-way point of more relaxed planning that then directly leads to the novel’s denouement and climax. This second novel thus follows a far more linear and expected path than its predecessor, removing a lot of thrill that could come from unpredictability. That isn’t to say that this linear journey isn’t also delightful and fulfilling. First off (or last off, depending on the reference point here), Cooney nails the novel’s ending with positive affirmations of the series’ themes of love, kith, and kin. Secondly, she features a fascinating shape shifter culture at the core of the journey to really enhance the world building of this series beyond merely rehashing the cultures she already delved into in book one. Thirdly, Cooney switches things up from Saint Death’s Daughter by focusing on other characters in Saint Death’s Herald. After becoming enraptured with Mak and Datu in the first book, some readers may be disappointed to find them in the background here. At first, that included this reader, but I slowly began to appreciate what Cooney was doing with this novel and began to enjoy and appreciate the new perspectives and character focus. Lanie remains at the heart of things, but getting other points of view does make the novel and world feel grander. I personally don’t care for Duantri (she seems to lack emotional and moral complexity that others may have so far) , so sections through her eyes were least enjoyed. However, I found Cracchen fantastic. After the ghost of Grandpa Rad vacates his body and some Sky Wizards collectively take his place, Cracchen becomes a fascinating character that opens the novel up to explore its key themes. I assume there will be a third book to this series, if not more novels. Saint Death’s Herald reads like a middle novel, starting fully engaged without any recap or introduction to get settled. (I had to reread my and other reviews of the first book after starting this because I had forgotten so many details and secondary characters.) Though great, it does lack a certain magic of discovery and surprise that makes it feel a little less than the original. It switches things up to keep fresh while retaining the core elements that positively define the series. Yet, unlike other ‘middle episodes’ it ends resolutely without relying on a cliff-hanger while still promising more revelations of Lanie Stone’s journey alongside Death in this vivid universe where even darkness is colorful and radiant.

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Skiffy and Fanty Open Call: Join the Crew!

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We’re looking to develop and expand, and to do that, we want to find new folks to join our handy little crew of geeks. Joining us comes with a few perks: you might get a free book or two here or there, you’ll definitely have some fun, and you probably will make some new friends! Right now, we are looking for folks to join the show and blog in two categories: contributors to the show/blog and contributors to the management of the show. You can join in both categories if you like; several of our current co-hosts also support the show by managing emails, editing the blog, etc. We are also especially interested in hearing from LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC folks. We want to continue being a show for all voices and continue our mission to give space to those voices in what we cover! Here’s a rundown of all the volunteers we’re looking for:

Cover of Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora, featuring a red, brown, and yellow female form, face obscured by plants, wearing a kimono-style top and a wide skirt, with roots rising up and weaving around her, against a black background.
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Book review: Silk & Sinew anthology, edited by  Kristy Park Kulski

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“Being in Thailand reminded her of an identity she’d lost in relocation, and probably why she always preferred haunted places and to be among ghosts. They existed somewhere in between, like her.”— “Mindfulness” by Rena Mason, in Silk & Sinew Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora, edited by Kristy Park Kulski, contains some really interesting stories, poems, and reflections, many of which transmit lovely feelings, and/or deep unease, and/or gut punches. Sometimes all at once! It came out in May, but I wasn’t in the right headspace to read a horror collection then. The main part of the book is divided into sections of Soil, Estuary, Bedrock, Roots, and Air. Each section starts with a poem (one in prose) and continues with several short stories more or less related to the theme. The front matter contains an Editor’s Note, a poem, and a Foreword by Monika Kim. The book ends with “Glimpses into the Historical Context” — providing short summaries of Colonialism in Taiwan, Enriching Far Away Worlds (about British colonialism breaking Indian economics), and An Ancient Land (about Armenia) — plus another poem, Acknowledgements, Content & Trigger Warnings, and sections about the authors, the editor, and the artist. I want to highlight the Content & Trigger Warnings section a little, because it’s in the back of the book, which may be a little late for people who just begin at the beginning and read straight through. But it makes sense to put it there, because the warnings are story-specific and thus contain spoilers for some things that will happen or be referenced in each story. A front-of-book warning would necessarily be either so generalized as to be useless, or a long list of specific harms that might put people off the book who could have just skipped stories that might have traumatized them in particular. In addition to possibly skipping to the back for the warnings in case you want to avoid, or at least brace yourself against, specific themes, I also recommend reading the Foreword by Monika Kim, which helps add to these stories and poems a context for our era. Like Silk & Sinew’s editor, Kristy Park Kulski (according to Kim), and like Kylie Lee Baker, whose Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng I reviewed in April, and doubtlessly like many others, she expresses dismay over the upsurge in anti-Asian sentiments, harassment, and violence following the COVID-19 pandemic; however, she also talks about finding some comfort and catharsis in reading and writing about experiences that may not always be shared, exactly, but that do resonate with common themes. There are seven poems and more than 20 stories in the anthology. All of the poems were evocative and included lovely, lyrical language, with emotions ranging from wistful and nostalgic, to harsh and angry, to fatalistic about oncoming doom, to wondering and hopeful, and more. The opening poem, “Treachery for the Forlorn” by Saba Syed Razvi, describes heartfelt memories and numinous figures, contrasting comfort with unease, inviting the reader to contemplate and speculate:“On this the night of a thousand echoes,…Which voice would you invoke into the walls of your heart, if the wayward would listen?” Many of the stories also contain lovely passages, or harrowing ones. All the writers here are extremely skilled at their craft. There are a lot that I don’t want to quote here because the most amazing sentences give away something important, but here’s one section: For the first time since I answered the phone—what seems like a lifetime ago—my vision blurs, turning the rippling grasses into a kaleidoscope of gold and green. I open myself up to my grief, letting the tears fall from my face into the river below, swirling into the current.I let the water taste me. I let them know I’m here.— “Fed by Earth, Slaked by Salt” by Jess Cho Many of the stories include elements of sacrifices that relatives are expected to make for each other, sometimes matter-of-factly like in “Mother’s Mother’s Daughter” by Audrey Zhou, sometimes resentfully, and sometimes even unknowingly. Sometimes the sacrifices are mutual, and sometimes they benefit entire communities. On the other hand, people can make sacrifices that only end up benefiting outsiders, via trickery and extractive economics, and some of these nominally horrific stories’ plots act as wish fulfillment for the vengeful. Numerous stories are about people adjusting to life in new lands, occasionally finding unexpected allies, or still coping with being treated as outsiders generations afterward. Several of the stories are about members of the diaspora visiting the lands their parents or ancestors came from; sometimes this leads to revelations and deeper understandings (e.g. “The Squatters” by Shawna Yang Ryan), sometimes to transformations, sometimes to potential gain for the inhabitants if not the visitors, and sometimes simply to fear, horror, and death. Sometimes the horror happens to the protagonists, and sometimes they perpetrate horrors upon others. Often the horror depends on the perspective the reader brings to the stories. I certainly don’t always agree with the actions or inactions of the protagonists, and I’m sure many stories contain nuances that I missed; however, I find most of them to be relatable in some manner. Each poem is moving in its own way, as are most of the stories, and everything in the anthology is interesting, often in very surprising ways. Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora, was published by Bad Hand Books but can also be ordered via other retailers.Authors: Kristy Park Kulski (editor, editor’s note, afterword, and acknowledgements); Monika Kim (foreword); Saba Syed Razvi, Geneve Flynn, Angela Yuriko Smith, Christina Sng, Rena Mason, Lee Murray, and Bryan Thao Worra (poems); and Audrey Zhou, Shawna Yang Ryan, Geneve Flynn, Ayida Shonibar, Kanishk Tantia, Jess Cho, Yi Izzy Yu, Angela Yuriko Smith, J.A.W. McCarthy, Nadia Bulkin, Robert Nazar Arjoyan, Rowan Cardosa, Seoung Kim, Saheli Khastagir, Gabriela Lee, Rena Mason, Ai Jiang, Christopher Hann, Priya Sridhar, and Lee Murray (stories). Three

Odyssey
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Across the (Homeric) Universe: Stephen Fry’s Odyssey

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Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyesThey call me on and on across the universeThoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter boxThey tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe— “Across the Universe”, The Beatles (written by John Lennon) I start with a quote from the Beatles for this review of Stephen Fry’s Odyssey because this book is not quite what I expected, and it encapsulates the main narrative of the book. Odyssey, the fourth book in his Mythos series (and honestly I had thought Troy, his third, would be his last)1 takes the form much more like Troy than the first two. Just as Troy was not a straight-up retelling of The Iliad, but rather the entire Trojan War from Troy’s origins (which at the time of reading that, I was rather fuzzy on) all the way to its start, and its finish. As you know, Bob, The Iliad isn’t even the end of the War, but rather just a pivotal episode in it. But he does go on to describe the end events of the Trojan War, and leaves us with Troy sacked and destroyed.  And so we wind up with Odyssey, now.  Odyssey does not have the titular The, and this is not, in fact, Odysseus’ story, or more belike, *just* Odysseus’ story. It is the story of all those that left the site after the end of the war. Odysseus, yes, but also Diomedes, Agammenon, and Menelaus. And, as it so happens, a survivor on the Trojan side…Aeneas. The setup of the book takes an event that Odysseus describes in one of his many tellings of his prior adventures to his various hosts2 and tells that, straight.  For the first two-thirds of the book, Fry tells things from a forward perspective in this regard, rather than it being recounted to us by someone else. In Odysseus’ retelling, the ships leaving Troy were all hit by the Gods’ wrath (the Greeks did not sacrifice properly or richly enough, and did some very bad things) and so ALL the fleets and travelers home had difficulties. This re-contextualizes Odysseus’ plight as just the *worst* of them all, and so we intercut and jump between the fates of the various Greek heroes.  Fry is a synthesizer and remixer of Greek myths and stories. He takes from every source he can find and puts it into his own telling. For a lot of the post-Trojan War stuff, then, he talks about drawing from various Greek plays, as well as Virgil’s the Aeneid (more on Aeneas in a moment). This gives him some more material than usual for his work, but it also means that, unlike the first three books, the wide-ranging alternatives of various characters are gone. In Mythos and Heroes, Fry struck home the idea, time and again, that there were often a dozen or more stories or contradictory details about characters. When we’ve gotten to the timeframe of The Odyssey, that is now gone. “Canon Formation” has happened, and, focusing on Odysseus again, there aren’t “alternate Odysseus stories” about his journey home in the extant literature3.  So we get Agamemnon, fated to be killed by his wife Clymenestra, and the whole tragic series of stories that herald the end of the Atreus family that we find in Aeschylus. We get something quite new to me in the fate of Meneleus, who got blown about the Mediterranean and wound up in Egypt, briefly. We get Aeneas, who does go to Italy to start the line that will found Rome, but not without his dalliance in Carthage, and with Dido. We follow all of these adventures, as well as the “early adventures” of Odysseus. Eventually though, we go full-on Odysseus, and the narrative frame of telling all of these stories falls away into a more straightforward retelling of The Odyssey, completely (and disappointingly to me) following The Odyssey’s pattern of having Odysseus tell stories of his prior adventures not already recounted, to various hosts. This feels like a disappointment to me, a gear shift in the book that doesn’t quite work. After taking pains to make this Odyssey rather than The Odyssey, in the end, Fry bows to the power of Homer, and starts to straight-up tell The Odyssey. All the beats that we know from his post-Calypso sojourn are here, including the beats with Telemachus (his son) and Odysseus telling his story to anyone who will listen4. Odysseus eventually returns in disguise, with Athena’s help, and the suitors of his long suffering wife Penelope are dealt with.  You may know this story even if you haven’t read The Odyssey. Certainly some of Odysseus’ story has permeated popular culture.  “No man has blinded me!” Circe and her penchant to transform men into animals. Scylla and Charbydis come from the Odyssey, too. And of course coming home and slaughtering all the men who have been harassing your patient and loyal wife for 20 years.  The Odyssey ends with the finale of that strife, but Fry does borrow from an earlier book in The Odyssey and makes it clear that, once the suitors are dealt with, Odysseus does have his one final journey with the oar on his shoulder. This is an episode of The Odyssey that doesn’t get as much play in adaptations, since it’s something that Tiresias tells him he must do but it takes place after the events of the main narrative. And that journey and those sacrifices can be truly seen to be the end of Odyssey, and the Greco-Roman myth cycle. In the course of the book, he has brought Aeneas to face Turnus and the end of that story cycle. And with that, the Greek Myth cycle that started with Mythos really is over. The Greco-Roman Gods and Goddesses, who, as Fry has noted, have been withdrawing more and more from human affairs, end their active engagement entirely. No more divine children, no more getting messed up

Cover of The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, by Malka Older, featuring two women turned slightly away but their hands still reaching for each other, against a futuristic cityscape and a swirling pink and purple sky.
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Book Review: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, by Malka Older

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Malka Older makes a rousing return to her acclaimed SF mystery/romance series, The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, with The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, coming out June 10. The novella that started the series, The Mimicking of Known Successes, was amazingly great (I reviewed it here), and I quite enjoyed the sequel, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. The latest book is the longest so far, but at 256 pages it feels just right. The mystery seems to have lower stakes than in previous books, but it also highlights previously unexplored aspects of the Giant (Jovian) society and returns to some elements of previous books that hadn’t exactly been resolved after all. The romance between Pleiti and Mossa undergoes some severe friction, but in the end … well, read it and see! I don’t advise jumping into the latest book if you’re new to Mossa and Pleiti; start with the first novella, since the relationship and the worldbuilding are complex and continue to develop throughout the series. However, it’s not necessary to reread the earlier works to pick up the series again at this point (especially if you’ve already reread in the intervals like me), since Older includes plenty of reminder-references and context clues to prior situations. (I think if you skipped the second book for whatever reason, you can still read the third without too much difficulty.) The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses opens with a prologue of Mossa lurking outside Pleiti’s quarters, oddly reluctant to enter. The action starts in Chapter 1 with Petanj, an old Valdegeld University schoolmate, asking Pleiti for help; Petanj’s cousin Villette, a rising scholar-star at rival Stortellen U. who’s scheduled to be honored soon with a donship that’s relatively early in her career, has been receiving nasty anonymous notes and a false accusation of plagiarism. Petanj thinks that Pleiti, as a fellow scholar, will be less official, less intimidating, and more familiar with academic environments than Investigator Mossi, but hopefully familiar enough with the investigative process (given Pleiti’s somewhat notorious participation in prior investigations) to help resolve this problem and growing scandal. Pleiti asks Mossi to investigate with her anyway, or at least consult with her, but Mossa, sunken into a deep apathy or worse, refuses to even listen to the case, and sends Pleiti away. For much of the book, Pleiti doesn’t see Mossa, and frequently asks herself What Would Mossa Do as she embarks on the investigation, wondering whether she should have stayed with Mossa instead to help lift her spirits, since she doesn’t seem to be making much progress as she chats with various associates of Villette (pretending to be a mere curious visitor who’d come for the donship ceremony). Libel escalates to sabotage and worse, but the university leadership is more inclined to blame Villette as a trouble-inciter than to find the culprit(s?). In many ways, this book reminds me of the wonderful academic mystery/romance Gaudy Night (1935), by Dorothy Sayers. In that, Harriet Vane, a mystery novelist, is asked to investigate various “poison pen” notes at her alma mater, a women’s college at Oxford; she begins to feel out of her depth when the attacks move from libelous taunts to violence, and writes about the case to her unsuccessful suitor, the famous detective Lord Peter Wimsey. The Potency of Ungovernable Obstacles doesn’t address women’s roles in society the way Gaudy Night does, since the Jovians of the future appear to have moved beyond that (although I note that the highest leaders of both universities here are men). And Potency doesn’t address clashes between town and gown mindsets the way Gaudy Night does (although Imposition touched on that lightly), but it does talk quite a lot about the different, and sometimes opposite, mindsets of the Classicists (studying Classic pre-Giant works in order to try to reconstruct a sustainable biosphere for ruined Earth) and the Modernists (focusing on life here and now on the orbiting rail-ring platforms around Giant/Jupiter). Distant from Valdegeld, the Stortellans have heard little more than vague rumors about the stirring events from the climax of The Mimicking of Known Successes, and some of them wonder whether the conspiracy there may have been much wider-reaching than the news said — which sets Pleiti to wondering whether she and Mossa really had gotten all the culprits; certainly the major perpetrator there had a lot of sympathizers. As Pleiti confesses late in Potency, she has much less faith now in leaders and institutions than she used to have. Eventually, Pleiti finds her own way to analyze the case and come to a conclusion; eventually, she gets some more help, and the mystery is solved, although not without some collateral damage along the way. Obviously I don’t want to spoil the perpetrator or the motives here, so I can’t talk about the resolution much. However, on a side note, I did feel pleasantly vindicated when I was confirmed in my guess about a romantic subplot. For the major romantic plot, both Mossa and Pleiti both struggle a lot with their feelings of inadequacy, and their tendencies to hurt each other with inadvertencies, occasional emotional obtuseness, and even efforts to shield each other from harm. Somehow, Malka Older manages to write this in a way that mostly has me sympathetically groaning “Oh, Mossa” or “Oh, Pleiti” instead of snarling, “Oh, come ON!” Mostly. But they do, eventually, communicate better. (And the book isn’t all grim and moody! There’s a lot of snide humor, and comfort food, and some exciting action!) Speaking of communication, I’ll mention the word choices here. Language on the platform is an evolving thing, which is natural for a society of Earth refugees thrown together and mixing and building a new way of life together around another world. In this future, numerous words have crossed over from other languages into English (or whatever language the future story has been translated from into our 21st-century usages, ha!), and various words have evolved via dropping prefixes or suffixes, or adding new

Cover of The Mercy of Gods, by James S.A. Corey, featuring dark, tilted spires looming over a shadowed cityscape, all under a golden dome.
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Book review: The Mercy of Gods, by James S.A. Corey

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I didn’t try to read The Mercy of Gods, by James S.A. Corey, when it came out last fall because I kind of felt like I should finish their The Expanse series first — not that finishing should have been hard, but there are so many books and shows, so little time! But then I heard a really interesting discussion of TMoG, and put myself on my library’s waitlist. I finally got the audio version, and it’s great! I’m now waitlisted for the novella Livesuit, and I hope to read book 2 in The Captive’s War series as soon as it comes out (expected this fall). The Mercy of Gods (and presumably the entire Captive’s War series) is science fiction about different types of resistance, and choices, under occupation and enslavement. It’s mostly told in third-person limited past tense, from the perspective of conquered humans, but the framing device is a partial summary/explanation by a conqueror librarian (or liaison) from the side of the alien Carryx, who laments not having realized the danger the humans posed. So although armed human resistance is swiftly defeated, and a lot of the book is grim, there is a spark of hope throughout. The humans in this space opera, who lived on a lost settlement world (obviously not their original homeworld, due to evidence of terraforming and lifeforms that are not biochemically compatible with them), never had a chance when their conquerors came from space and immediately killed off an eighth of their population as a show of force. After a few futile days of armed warfare, numerous humans are taken prisoner and transported offworld to be assessed for suitability as servants/workers/slaves (“animals” according to the Carryx). Most of the POV characters are members of a scientific work group that had been trying to find ways to make alien lifeforms compatible, for nourishment, pharmacology, and similar purposes; the conquerors see the potential value of this and keep the group together. Tommen, the brilliant scientist in charge, nearly gets himself killed arguing for more privileges for the group; researcher Jessyn Kaul focuses initially on personal survival after losing access to maintenance drugs. Dafyd Alkhor, a semi-slacking young research assistant who’d obtained his job through political/familial connections, uses his prior networking skills to closely observe the conquerors and other subject species to try to figure out what behavior is desired from them. Some might view Dafyd as a collaborator, but he’s playing the long game, believing the aliens who’d said humans would be judged for their usefulness and concluding that their survival depended on that (especially since it turns out that they’re in competition with other subject species). This inevitably brings him into quiet conflict with the people who long for revenge and think that violently demonstrating their utter unsuitability as slaves will lead the Carryx to simply leave humans alone. Eventually, Dafyd has to make a crucial choice. Also active in the plot is a secret infiltrator from another species that’s already fighting the Carryx. The reader meets the Swarm entity early, but it’s only much later in the book that they reveal themselves to Dafyd, to tip the balance in his internal argument of freedom-fighting vs. the long game by giving him hope for the future. Given the Swarm’s method of infiltration (taking a human host), I’m unconvinced that they’re a reliable ally, but they certainly strongly oppose the Carryx. I expect that later books will reveal more about their nature and goals. The Mercy of Gods reminds me a lot of a great 1990 book by C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season. That’s set 300 years after hive-minded aliens conquered the Earth; the main character is a man who faintly remembers the days before. After the aliens discover some of his differences and take him offplanet to study him, he starts remembering more about himself, and escapes; eventually, he meets an energy being who can assume human form. Meanwhile, there’s a group of human technicians who work for the aliens but are part of a long-term resistance plan, and there’s one aberrant hive alien struggling to understand individuality. This is a truly fascinating book that explores various concepts in amazing ways, including different methods of adaptation and survival under subjugation, and various forms of identity (self vs. species, and selfhood through evolutions of memory, ability, and purpose). The Mercy of Gods also explores identity, via the Swarm’s assimilations and through people deciding who they are under great changes and stress, but it also explores group dynamics in some ways I haven’t seen much, at least not in such depth. The people whom we follow after the invasion are perforce grouped together as captives, and they mostly try to take care of each other, as much as they’re allowed, but some of them also start forming resistance cells. Tommen retains nominal control of the research group’s activities (he’s enraged to discover that Jessyn has been working on a private project), but Dafyd gradually assumes leadership of their interactions outside the lab. People who’ve relied on others are forced to discover their own capabilities, and various other personal loyalties and associations undergo shifts as events unfold and enforce new priorities. The Mercy of Gods is definitely not for everyone; its generally grim tone, punctuated by extreme violence and body-horror issues, may make it harrowing for some. However, the ideas it explores are fascinating, and the way it upholds patience, careful observation, and critical thought, along with the hope of future victory, are encouraging. Despite the tight focus on characters, the worldbuilding is vast and leaves lots of room for more developments. I found it thoroughly engaging and compelling, and I look forward very much to the next installment in The Captive’s War. Orbit Books published The Mercy of Gods, by James S.A. Corey, on Aug. 6, 2024. It’s the first book in a planned trilogy, plus two novellas, called The Captive’s War. Content warnings: War, population decimation (well, an eighth, even worse than a tenth),

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