James S.A. Corey explains how The Captive's War is different from The Expanse

The past few months have been pretty exciting for fans of The Expanse, the sweeping science fiction saga by James S.A. Corey, aka authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. In August, Corey launched a brand new book series called The Captive's War. The first book, The Mercy of Gods, introduced us to a far-flung planet of humans who are captured by the Carryx, an insectoid alien race which conquers other sentient species and puts them to work fueling their empire.

The Mercy of Gods was an excellent start to Corey's new series, but it was only the beginning. Earlier this month, Abraham and Franck released a follow-up novella titled Livesuit, which expands the world of The Captive's War in some intriguing and unexpected ways. We don't have a release date for the second full volume of The Captive's War yet, but given James S.A. Corey's track record for releasing books with astounding consistency, I imagine we'll be reading it sooner rather than later.

I've been enjoying sinking into this new series from these masters of science fiction, and of course, that's sent me scouring the corners of the internet for any information I can find about it. Enter SFF Addicts, a podcast which interviews authors about their works hosted by Adrian M. Gibson, author of the fungalpunk novel Mushroom Blues, and M.J. Kuhn, author of the fantasy books Among Thieves and Thick as Thieves. Kuhn and Gibson had the opportunity to sit down with Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck and ask them all about their latest series — which led to some really interesting moments where the writing duo explained how The Captive's War is rooted in "a different part of the genre" than The Expanse. Watch the full interview below, or keep scrolling to read some highlights:

James S.A. Corey explains why The Captive's War feels so different from The Expanse

James S.A. Corey's hit sci-fi series The Expanse was set in our own solar system, and leaned heavily into the politics of various human factions vying for dominance while an alien threat looms at the edges of awareness. Yes, the protomolecule was dangerous and mysterious and shook up the status quo, but at the end of the day it was always the humans and their decisions which drove the story forward. By contrast, The Captive's War feels more like Mass Effect, the sort of space opera which features a wide array of aliens where you never know what you'll see on the next page.

"The Captive's War is kind of the other side of space opera from The Expanse," Abraham explained. "The Expanse is Alfred Bester and Larry Niven and Arthur [C.] Clarke, and this...grounded science fiction that really kind of considers that part of a history. But there's a whole different realm of science fiction that is Dune and Left Hand of Darkness and all of these things that are very far future, very broad canvases. And we've moved over there to do this."

I caught myself nodding along as I listened to Abraham explain these varying influences, because they absolutely come through in The Mercy of Gods. If James S.A. Corey's goal was to create a sci-fi story that jumped over to the more alien, more imaginative side of the genre, I'd say they succeeded. They also talked about the origin of the series. Similar to The Expanse, it all began with a pitch from Franck, who Abraham called "the idea guy" of the team:

"And he pitched, what if you re-envisioned the biblical Book of Daniel as epic science fiction? If you have this person who is taken by the great empire the way that the slaves were taken to Babylon, and incorporated into the mechanisms of empire. And how you deal with being the functionary of your oppressor, and also maintaining yourself and maintaining your view and maintaining your struggle against oppression in that context. And I thought yeah, that sounds awesome, we should do that."

- Daniel Abraham

The Carryx are after the rarest resource in the galaxy: intelligence

Franck also got into some of the nitty gritty about the book itself, talking about the alien Carryx and what drives them. It turns out there was a very common science fiction pitfall that he was determined to avoid.

"This is another thing science fiction always gets wrong," Franck said. "So the story where aliens fly fast expensive spaceships across hundreds of lightyears to come steal your water, or to steal your iron or your titanium are ludicrous. Or they come to eat you. Those are ludicrous ideas. So what is the one actually rare resource in the universe? Intelligence. That's rare, right? Much more rare than water or titanium or anything else that aliens might want. So an alien species that says, 'We're gonna go collect all of the intelligence from these other species, and put it to work for us. So we won't have to invent everything, we'll have these people who invent things for us because we went and got them and they're smart.' And so once you start from that premise, what the Carryx do is they collect intelligence. They collect inventiveness."

Franck went on to explain how this leads the Carryx to rounding up the best and the brightest of each new intelligent species they encounter, those at the "edge of inventiveness" for their respective trades or crafts or sciences, in order to bolster the Carryx empire. We see that in full action in The Mercy of Gods...which set up the idea that the Carryx may have just bitten off more than they can chew with one human in particular, Dafyd Alkhor, who becomes the representative of the humans of Anjiin thanks to his uncanny knack for putting himself inside the heads of others to understand how they think. We'll see how that progresses whenever the sequel comes out.

What happened to the other humans in The Captive's War?

There is one other really interesting thing that Abraham and Franck said during the interview that caught my attention. In The Mercy of Gods, we only really see the humans who live on a planet called Anjiin. They have no historical record of how they got there, or of Earth. Later in the podcast, Abraham and Franck talked about some of the difficulties of writing The Mercy of Gods, and specifically the challenges of writing a human culture when you can't use many of the touchstones we'd associate with Earth, like quoting Shakespeare or using certain building materials that may not be available on an alien planet. It's here that Franck dropped an interesting clue about the people of Anjiin:

"You need the people to feel like people, to feel like us. You don't want them to feel totally alien," he said. "At the same time, in The Mercy of Gods, we're talking about people who've been separated from the rest of humanity for thousands of years, and so would have different religions, different sort of worldviews, different philosophies. And how much of that can you include in there before they start to feel like aliens? So that's sort of a tightrope you have to walk."

This is confirmation that there are other humans out there who've been separated and probably oblivious to the existence of the Anjiin humans for millennia. That's a really intriguing bit of worldbuilding that I imagine we'll find out a lot more about in future books, and it also syncs up nicely with Livesuit, which introduced other humans familiar with Earth.

There are a lot of mysteries yet to be solved in The Captive's War, and we'll be following along closely to see how it all plays out. If you enjoyed The Mercy of Gods or The Expanse, the SFF Addicts interview above is very much worth a watch. There's also a second part of it, which you can watch here, where Franck and Abraham break down their method of co-writing books together.

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