This is a book that took guts to write.
No spoilers beyond what can be easily inferred from the book blurb.
The book starts, more or less, with humanity being conquered by immeasurably more advanced aliens known as the Carryx. The protagonists are one of humanity’s most cutting-edge research teams, taken (along with others of the best and brightest) to the Carryx homeworld. There, they are thrown into a city/prison with members of uncounted other conquered species. Their new overlords give them a task, and tell them that those who prove useful will be integrated into the Carryx’s empire; those who do not will be culled.
It’s a solid setup for a science fiction book. It’s also one where, generally, I would assume that I could see where things are going. Looks like it’s shaping up to be a grand story of rebellion, something like Red Rising perhaps.
But that’s not what this is. The reason I said writing this book took guts is that this is the story of a collaborator.
The protagonist, Dafyd, is the youngest member of the research team - just a lab assistant, the one who cleans the glassware and gets the coffee. But he’s also the one who is fastest to understand the true nature of the task the Carryx have set for them, and the criteria by which they are being judged. He’s the one who comes closest to understanding the way that the Carryx see the universe and everyone’s place in it. And he’s the one who understands just what some of his companions are risking as they plan a rebellion.
The protagonist of a book doesn’t need to be someone the reader agrees with or even likes. But it needs to be someone the reader can empathize with, and Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck did a masterful job with Dafyd. Anyone under the control of something so many orders of magnitude more powerful than you has very few meaningful choices - read up on the Jewish councils the Nazis set up to administer the ghettos during World War II for some real-life examples. But even when the person doing the choosing isn’t responsible for the choices they face, they still have to make the impossible choice and bear the burden of having done so.
The book was a little bit slow to really grab me, but once it did I had a lot of trouble putting it down. The obvious question is how does it compare to the Expanse books. I would say that I could tell it was written by Abraham & Franck, especially in the conversations and interactions between the characters. But this is looking like a very different series going to very different places.
I look forward to finding out exactly where.
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