The Expanse franchise may have wrapped up across its novels, TV series, and video game, but the original writing duo of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (using the nom de plume James S. A. Corey) will debut a new space opera next year.
The Captive’s War trilogy will kick off with The Mercy of Gods on August 6, 2024. In the livestream announcing the book, Franck described the project as a retelling of The Old Testament’s Book of Daniel in a science-fiction setting. He also cited Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea) and Frank Herbert (Dune) as touchstones. Franck went on to discuss wanting to recapture the feeling of Dune, in particular, in the way it’s set so far in the future that enormous swathes of the lore and history are simply implied.
The Mercy of Gods will tell the story of research assistant Dafyd Alkhor, who finds himself caught up as a pawn in an interstellar war between two alien races. He, along with what little is left of humanity after a Carryx attack, is snatched away to the Carryx homeworld to compete “against the other captive species with extinction as the price of failure. Only Dafyd and a handful of his companions see past the Darwinian contest to the deeper game that they must play to survive: learning to understand — and manipulate — the Carryx themselves.”
In the livestream, Abraham outlined that while The Captive’s War trilogy is another space opera, it will feel quite different from the “particular slice of space opera that was sort of between late Apollo 13 and kind of early Buck Rogers” of The Expanse. He added, “It’s such a very different part of the genre. There’s some things we get to do and play with we couldn’t have done anywhere else.”
The announcement also came with a cover reveal:
The Expanse book series ended in 2021 with Leviathan Falls, with the TV adaptation concluded in January 2022, and The Expanse: A Telltale Series video game ended its run back in September 2023.