Enjoy James S.A. Corey's new book The Mercy of Gods? You need to read Livesuit, the first Captive's War novella

James S.A. Corey — a pseudonym for the writing duo Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck — is best known as the creator of The Expanse, but in August, they started a new series set in an entirely new universe: The Captive's War. The first volume, titled The Mercy of Gods, follows a group of human scientists through a traumatic alien invasion where they were captured and made to serve at the whims of the insectoid Carryx. By the end of the story, we get to know a bit more about the Carryx and how they assimilate various other sentient species into their imperial war machine, courtesy of the desperate humans who've survived in their midst long enough to prove they could be useful to the empire.

But there are still many mysteries left to be solved in The Captive's War. How long have the Carryx been fighting their seemingly endless war across the stars? Who exactly is their "great enemy," which is responsible for the sentient "swarm" we met in The Mercy of Gods? And how did humans come to live on the planet Anjiin anyway? The residents of Anjiin have no idea how they ended up there, but could other human societies exist in the distant reaches of space which have more connections to Earth?

As of right now, we don't have a release date for the sequel to The Mercy of Gods, so we'll be waiting a while to find out most of those answers. But if you're a reader of The Expanse, you know James S.A. Corey never leaves you hanging. It may have only been a few months since The Mercy of Gods came out, but Corey has already released a follow-up novella set in the world of The Captive's War, titled Livesuit. The ebook is available right now, so you don't even have to wait to read it! (And with a price point of $2.99, it's a steal.)

What is Livesuit about?

I've just finished reading Livesuit, and rather than do a traditional review (it was excellent), I thought it might be a little more fun to talk about what this novella is, and where it might fit into the overall mythos of The Captive's War. For this first section, there will be mild spoilers as we discuss the general setup for the novella. Don't worry, I'll give a big old spoiler warning before we get into the juicy stuff that happens in Livesuit later on.

Livesuit is the story of a man named Kirin, who joins a seemingly eternal war against a capricious alien enemy who is capturing and enslaving humans. Sound familiar? Yes, that enemy is the Carryx, something that becomes clear so early in the story it doesn't even feel like a spoiler to say it. Kirin is a member of the Livesuit infantry, a special type of soldier who melds with a technologically advanced suit that turns them into a robot killing machine for the duration of their tour. Suffice to say, Livesuit soldiers are a powerful advantage on the battlefield.

"Humanity's war is eternal, spread across the galaxy and the ages. Humanity's best hope to end the endless slaughter is the Livesuit forces. Soldiers meld their bodies to the bleeding edge technology, becoming something more than human for the duration of a war that might never end."

- Livesuit synopsis

The novella itself is told in two timelines: one which follows Kirin through a dangerous mission and its subsequent fallout, and another which details how he became a Livesuit soldier in the first place. The question of time is ever-present; Livesuit soldiers are shipped all around the galaxy to fight, utilizing a "brane-slip" system of FTL travel that plays with relativity. Questions surrounding the timeline and Kirin's reliability as a narrator come into play throughout the story, and it makes for a fascinating tale that rewards close reading.

The novella strongly reminded me of stories like The Forever War and Starship Troopers, digging deep into how war changes a person and whether they can ever truly return to who they were before. Something I've enjoyed about The Captive's War is how Corey is wearing those sorts of influences on their proverbial sleeve, and that's even more true for Livesuit than it was for The Mercy of Gods.

Do you have to read The Mercy of Gods before Livesuit?

One question you may have is whether Livesuit is better read before or after The Mercy of Gods. The answer is that, really, you could read them in either order. Livesuit is a self-contained story that doesn't play into specific events from The Mercy of Gods, so as of right now they both stand well enough on their own. However, I would recommend reading The Mercy of Gods first. Even though Livesuit would read just fine without prior knowledge, there are clues about how it might fit into the overall saga which you'll miss if you haven't read The Mercy of Gods.

The Mercy of Gods also gives us a slower, more detailed introduction to the Carryx, their most recognizable subservient alien slave species, and the workings of their empire. If you've read it, you'll have better context for what appears in Livesuit. The novella is all about Kirin's story, so you don't need to worry about it being reliant on Easter eggs or anything, but I'd still argue that reading The Mercy of Gods first will make for a fuller experience. That's especially true once we start thinking about how Livesuit fits into the overall mythos for The Captive's War.

Now we're going to get into MAJOR SPOILERS FOR LIVESUIT below, as we discuss its ending and what it might mean. If you haven't read the novella, go do that first and then come back; it's less than 100 pages, so you'll make short work of it.

Is Livesuit set before or after The Mercy of Gods?

One huge question I had going into Livesuit is whether it's set before or after The Mercy of Gods. The synopsis for the novella purposely omits this crucial bit of information, which I found to be intriguing rather than frustrating. As I mentioned above, the nature of time collapsing in on itself and becoming hard to track is a major idea that Livesuit plays with, so the ambiguity works in its favor. Once Kirin joins the Livesuit infantry, missions blend together and details from his past become blurry. Eventually, he finds out that decades have passed while he was fighting in the war, even though only a few years have passed for him in "subjective" time.

But if we did want to try to pin down where Livesuit is set in the mythos, I think there are some really interesting clues. In The Mercy of Gods, the humans of Anjiin had no prior knowledge of the Carryx before being invaded. You'd think this would probably mean Livesuit is set after it, since Kirin and his companions have been fighting the Carryx for decades...but I think the opposite is true, that Livesuit is set long before The Mercy of Gods.

This is only my speculation, because as of right now we don't have a finite answer, but I think there's some evidence for it. By the end of Livesuit, we find out that the titular Livesuit robot armor is melding over the human hosts inside, essentially erasing them as it heals up their wounds. We find this out through Piotr, Kirin's friend who suffered a brain injury on a mission. In the final pages of the novella, it becomes clear that Piotr's Livesuit had replaced his brain and consciousness; Piotr as we knew him had likely died years earlier.

I think that the Livesuit soldiers become the "great enemy" the Carryx mention in The Mercy of Gods. There are similarities, such as the fact that the enemy the Carryx faces in the main book escape battles "wrapped in shells of titanium and deep copper," which sounds very similar to the way the escape pods are described in Livesuit. In Chapter 14 of The Mercy of Gods, which depicts a clash with the enemy from the perspective of the Carryx Ekur-Tkalal, we get a bunch of these sorts of clues. Take this paragraph, for example:

"Ekur-Tkalal knew that the enemy was virtually deathless, that their animals of violence could be riddled with injuries and flow forward like a tide. The heat and pulse of the living organism could fade without ending its assault."

- The Mercy of Gods, Chapter 14

That sounds pretty much exactly like the way the Livesuit soldiers function. In the novella, we see multiple examples of Kirin or other people getting wounded, and then their Livesuit robotic skin taking over and forcing their body into whatever actions will keep them in the fight. We even see Piotr presumably die, and then his Livesuit take over and keep animating his body mere minutes later.

In that same chapter, Ekur-Tkalal also notes that "the enemy bled black and red and clear." In Livesuit, the scans which show how much the Livesuits have taken over a human body display their interior workings in black; the red would be human blood. I'm stumped on the "clear" part of that sentence, but I would guess it's some sort of liquid which keeps the suit functioning.

Combine all this with another clue in Livesuit, which is that the Carryx there seem far more primitive, and I think there's some strong evidence that the novella is set before The Mercy of Gods. In the main book, the Carryx execute captives with highly advanced technology in an instant. In Livesuit, they have to go one-by-one down rows of humans slitting their throats.

I think Livesuit is set centuries or even millennia before The Mercy of Gods, and it's showing us the initial rise of the "great enemy" the Carryx face: humans in Livesuits. Over time, the robotic suits came to be fully in charge of their human hosts and kept the fight going with the Carryx for all those years. Human survivors on colony worlds like Anjiin might have lost all history in the intervening centuries, forgetting how they came to be isolated on those worlds in the first place. Perhaps the Anjiin humans are even descendants of the anti-war faction that's referenced in Livesuit. What if they sought safety in isolation after discovering how the Livesuit armor was permanently turning people into robots for the war effort?

Knowing James S.A. Corey, I'm sure we'll be getting answers to those questions in upcoming books. But for now, it's a lot of fun to speculate about how Livesuit fits into the narrative of The Captive's War.

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