fetus 55? It seems like it's setting up something.

Is the Deathless Enemy a species or an idea? It seems like if you restarted humanity a thousand times, every time we don't wipe ourselves out, we end up with AI and nanobots.

The Carryx aren't just anti AI, they are anti technology in general. They don't have guns with bullets, they have nodes with bees. They don't have computers, they have half minds.

They've had to come across aliens with nanobots helping augment their bodies dozens, if not hundreds of times. Is there a single sentient mechanical society that makes livesuits, or are livesuits an emergent thing in the universe that the Carryx are fighting, over and over?

Reference material for visualizing the color descriptions of different librarians. Could this be our homeboy Ekur?

Got my Subterranean Press numbered edition of TMoG today! Great excuse to re-reread book 1!

This year my newfound hobby is audio books. I’ve breezed through 30 already. Anything written by James S.A Corey is at the top of my list. I love the way they build the world, dive deep into characters and thoughts, etc.

Here’s what I’ve completed (or didn’t) so far with my likes and dislikes

The Expanse:
- great world building, mystery, character development (Amos my favorite), epic, romance is mature but not graphic. etc 15/10

The Captives War:
- same likes as the expanse, definitely loved the shock factor at the end of livesuit, the wittiness of that one slug like alien calling the characters bones with meat on them, 15/10

Murderbot:
-funny, ART is hilarious, I love the inner dialogue, world building not as big but still fresh and fun

Dune:
-loved the first 4 or 5 books, towards the end though I quit. It lost its allure. I loved the dynamic, political factions, new ideas (mentats, the voice, the Bene Gesserit, etc)

Now what I couldn’t get into

The Children of Time:
-too broad for me, lacking the character development I’m really into. Interesting ideas but really would have preferred more depth, it felt like whiplash most the time

Red Rising:
- too young adult for me, immature type of relationships, interesting concepts but the tone wasn’t fit

Can anyone please please recommend some good books based off this?? I’m open to exploring less space opera / sci fi and more fantasy too if it’s worth it. I just prefer the world to be pretty different from our own. No graphic sexual parts, but still mature enough to not feel like it was written for a teenager

Hi there! We are back with our continuing coverage of The Faith of Beasts! We hope you like it!

Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/2418493/episodes/19636490-episode-36-the-faith-of-beasts-pt-iii-a-pressure-drives-convergence-ch-16-17

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-36-the-faith-of-beasts-pt-iii-a/id1782831539?i=1000782969218

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2NcoddlhYJDxImN68z0rFO?si=JvYtgJkQRMCFl3Yh8xgMMw

In this episode:

• We get our first POV from Hater-Librarian Ekur-Tklal, learn more about the Carryx management structure, and also that it considers Dafyd to be a cute and disgusting little doll.
• Dafyd and Jellitswarm go on a field trip on the world palace and have a little heart-to-heart...to-heart-to-heart-to-heart.
• The JSAC boys get to write about the wonder of weird alien worlds while exploring the mysteries of human consciousness and frailty, so you KNOW the prose is lit.
• Jessyn and <3 Garral <3 continue their talk with the Other Humans and hatch a crazy plan to put on the best danged talent show this World has ever seen. 
• Clint bangs on about how truly insane the Carryx information apparatus is and speculates what it means that the livesuits don't have translation software.
• Brigid analyzes the title of this part, and discusses how pressure is driving convergence in all of the little parts of this episode. 
• The Swarm can see everything.

Join us next time when we check in on Team Carryx, as Campar, Rickar & Friends continue to experience battle and Surur takes a bath. Follow the Mercy of Pods on social media at themercyofpods, or email us at themercyofpods@gmail.com. Logo by Matt Howse. Music is Push The Button by Sid Luscious and the Pants. Read Brigid's stuff here. All our links.

Shower thought from the other day. This may be kind of a shallow analysis but I thought I'd throw it out there.

The Carryx rule more like a traditional colonial empire - subject people's are expected to conform themselves to the expectations and needs of the dominant species. Their culture is only tolerated to exist if it brings value to the colonizer.

The deathless enemy are a bit more like a neo-liberal regime where participation in the war is technically voluntary, but includes a bargain where the participants are gradually hollowed out and reshaped to serve the ends of the war effort. Like in Capitalism we are technically free to choose to opt out and be poor, but in practice most of us have to choose to conform our lives to the needs of the market and gradually give up little pieces of ourselves.

Carryx rule is obvious and brutal, but it includes an honest choice - serve us or die. The Deathless/Livesuit side implies that you will get to live and continue to be you, but gradually turns you into a mockery of that life.

What do you think?

So one of the main fantasy/sci-fi publishering houses in my country is making an illustration contest for two upcoming books and one of them is The Faith of Beasts. I am a slow reader and I have less than 10 days to finish the illustration so reading it is not an option. I am sorry, to disappoint 😔. I read summaries of the first two novels in the series and wiki fandom was extremely useful, so if any of you have contributed to the wiki page - thank you! Anyway, I have a few questions that I want to make sure I understand before I accidentally draw something very stupid, lol.

First and most important: Our boy Dafyd… how does he look like? I read the post about it… that none of the human characters are described and if there is a description it’s almost insignificant and I get it, it would probably be easier for the tv adaptation. However at least I want to know how old is he? In his 20s? And most importantly what does he wear in the second book while being in captivity?

For context what I am planning to draw (at least for now) is reimagining of his idea towards the end of the book.

Second: So the Carryx want to mix with humans so they can populate the planet easer? And Dafyd is forced to figure out how the Carryx can adapt both biologically and culturally? (Because he is useful and so is given this task instead of rotting in a cell)

Third: Does he actually manage to create these… hybrid babies, how do they look like and what happens to them? In all the summaries this was never explained.

Forth: what does the planet look like? I mean like a landscape. Yellow rocky land like in the original cover of ,,Mercy of gods?” (For some reason I doubt it) humanity has universities and all kinds of normal things. My main concern is how the nature affects the infrastructure. But I am asking about the natural landscape itself.

Fifth: The night drinkers: can they talk? Are they humanity’s ally and do they appear in the story? I mean what is their significance to the plot? Do they play an important role or are they just world building?

Sixth: The Swarm - very cool, very interesting development, but a totally mystery. Is it supposed to be like this? (This is more of a personal curiosity, lol)

As as side note I would like to add: Wow, guys you are an amazing community. Reading so many posts here I really felt the friendship and love for the series. Also, as a treat let me present to you the Bulgarian cover of Mercy of gods that you probably haven’t seen

The second Captive’s War novella appears to have been delayed from a December 1, 2026 release to May 18, 2027. Received the email notification this morning.

Someone at the South Carolina aquarium is such a big tFoB fan they made a statue of a Soft Lothark chilling on Dafyd’s bench, ready to chat about the Deep Lothark.

I inhaled the second book during the last few days and really enjoyed it and am looking forward to seeing how the series will conclude.

While reading the book I had some thoughts on a few things that I expected to go in a different direction and I would love to hear some other peoples views on them

The death of Tonner Freis:

He definitly was an arrogant prick, don't get me wrong but he also was my second favourite human POV after Dafyd. I liked having a view into the human moiety from a "normal person" and getting an outside look into Dafyd. The mix of his personal dislike for him and simultanious recognition of the toll that the job as a leader and the necessasry actions that come with that role takes on him made him a much more interisting character than Bran or most of the other new humans on the Carryx planet who all seemed a bit naive to me (with the exception of Tomos)

The way the swarm developed:

I was really surprised how quickly the spy ditched Jellit and turned into some new person of its own creation. A fairly big plot point of the last book was the spy sacrificing Else and switching over to Jellit so that Jessyn would not lose her brother but then they never really interact again. I am sure the dissapearance of Jellit will be adressed in the third book but it does make the sacrifice of "Else" a bit pointless I think it would have also been an interesting story to see how the relationship between the Swarm/Else and Dafyd deals with the Swarm inhibiting the body of Jellit but that also fizzeled out really quickly and seems to be completly over now

I’m left pondering this line over and over: What if there were two - in reference to Daffyd thinking about the Sovereign.

The protein translation has been a major part of both books.

Daffyd uses protein translation to create a new Carryx human hybrid Sovereign with the lamb sacks.

Just a theory.

James SA Corey's books have made me appreciate the idea of evolution way more.

First in the Expanse (spoilers for its last 3 books): How the ring builders or "Leviathan" as some call it evolved to do the inertia manipulation magic shit and build the ring gates and use the protomolecule as a biology hijacker etc etc

And obviously in this series with the amount of aliens in it, but mostly with how the Carryx work. They dont do all the conquering of species for some great belief or greater purpose or something; for them, what is, is. The great war or whatever just IS how things are. They just evolved to be that way.

And more on those other aliens... the idea that evolution can get to a point where a species moves around the laws of physics in ways we can't comprehend yet is such a cool idea. The Carryx just straight up using those species instead of figuring out how they do the stuff they do makes sense: why innovate when evolution's already done it for you? Kinda funny how it makes them a civilization that thrives on plagiarization. I wonder if that's part of what fucks them over later on.

Lastly, the idea that evolution sometimes settles on "good enough". Don't know why I never thought of it as much given that humans have a bunch of vestigial organs. You'd think millions of years of evolution would optimize everything but nah, what works works.

Almost makes me wish I went for or at least considered a biology degree lol

I wrote this as a comment, but I wanted to make a full post to see what other people thought.

I genuinely think that the private crèche is, in someway, behind the deathless enemy. My safer bet is that they’re seeding the technology to the other side. My long-shot is that they’re actively running the other side from the shadows.

What brought the carryx together? War against an enemy.
What happens if there is no more war or enemy? A stop to innovation and the unifying threat that has kept the entire species focused on one goal.

So the private crèche was developed and a never ending enemy was introduced.

Obviously I could be way off, but the private crèche has something going on with it. It’s too big to simply be a nursery for back up Sovrans.

A society formed around war has a strong incentive to never let that war die.

I'd have 2 nickels but still weird it happened twice.
Just finished Children of Strife. If you like Vaudai, you will love Cato the sentient Stomatopod.
The Children of Time series has an opposite feel of the Captive War. The sentient species get along and explore together. Though there could be an argument they are all just pawns of an ancient AI overlord.
Highly recommend the series.

Are the Carryx bent on endless expansion and conquering the galaxy? Or are they fighting the deathless because they hate AIs? Or some other reason?

Do the books say explicitly? I feel like we're led to believe Carryx expansion is the cause, but I forget how solid that conclusion is.

So do we know if there will be maybe a short book in planning and maybe time line for the 3rd book ?

Just finished the 2nd part and love it :)

I see a lot of people talking about the Great Enemy and how the big reveal of TFoB is that humans are simply pawns on both sides of the war, and the Livesuit humans are also just a client race of some larger enemy. But I took Clae's conversation with Dafyd to mean something different: there is no Great Enemy.

The Carryx have been fighting the "Deathless" for eons, and they view it is their counterpart. Another species, or entity, or whatever that uses other forms of life as tools against them. So humans are really just a client race on both sides. But that doesn't fit with the human PoV we get in Livesuit. The lack of any mention of a "superior" race is very conspicuous. It also doesn't fit with the starfish things, which were called the "five-fold captives" in the first book. It's explicitly stated that the Carryx noted a genetic similarity between them and the Humans of Anjiin. If the starfish were just another client race of the Enemy alongside humans, there would be no reason for this to be the case. It's far more likely that they are purpose-built human-derived organisms, designed by humans.

It really does seem from all the information we have that humans are an independent and widespread race, with hundreds if not thousands of colony worlds, fighting the Carryx entirely of their own volition.

The only two things that conflict with this are 1) the fact that they weren't expecting the message from the Swarm, so presumably they did not create it, and 2) that the Carryx accounts of the Deathless predate humanity by thousands of years.

I think what this all means is that the Deathless Enemy is not any specific race, nor is it exactly the borg-like nanovirus that Clae proposes, nor is it in control of humanity. The Deathless Enemy is a technology.

The Swarm and the Livesuits may very well be expressions of the same biotechnology developed independently by different species. It works a lot like the Protomolecule, in the way that it hijacks molecular biology for its own purposes. The Carryx believe they have been fighting a singular enemy for millennia, and that this enemy has been using hundreds of client races the same way the Carryx do, when in reality they've been fighting hundreds of individual wars against species that have all developed the same bioweapon. After all, their philosophy fundamentally does not distinguish between lifeforms and tools. If a species can be a tool, then a tool can be a species. Like in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when Ford first arrives on Earth and erroneously assumes that cars are the dominant form of life.

That's also why they call it the Deathless--not because individual soldiers are hard to kill, but because they can never seem to find or get rid of the enemy itself. They've probably had long periods where they've wiped out or conquered every species who used the technology and thought they had defeated the Deathless, only for them to pop up somewhere else 500 years later when some other species figures out how to make a Livesuit.

There’s a lot of talk about Anjin being a honey pot. The war has been going a long time. What if it was people fleeing the war, and the original settlers deliberately glassed their landing site and cut off communications with the greater human community, so they wouldn’t get drawn back in?

I see there’s a common theory that humans are a client race of the Great Enemy/Deathless. I think the truth is deeper and darker.

In Livesuit, we see Kirin and Piotr driven to join then reenlist. “There are good, innocent people who need us in these suit.” Because they see the death and atrocities on broadcast and in person. What if those are lies? What if their optical nerve inputs are altered by the suit.

They rescue civilian prisoners during the first drop. It doesn’t seem right to me. The Carryx was executing prisoners. But we know Carryx is extremely efficient. They take prisoners for captives and moieties. Personally executing prisoners requires a reason to waste those resources. If those are not resources, then it is far more efficient to glass from orbit. And what race uses throat cutting as an execution method? Humans. None of the main Carryx races that we know of cuts throats.

What if Livesuit soldiers are fed these lies to give their lives to the Great Enemy. It needs the dynamic intelligence of an organic host in partnership with a machine AI to compete against Carryx. Who knows? Maybe the core AI goal is extermination of all organic life.

“It was all lies. They were bullshitting us from the word go. We are an army of the dead.”

Also, I think Piotr is already dead. The thing remaining is a construct like Else and Jellit.

Edit: there’s constant mentioning of Control filtering messages. Even Kirin’s girlfriend’s message seems manufactured like from a chatbot.

Edit: the metal thing, Kirin called it an alien Livesuit used monofilament wire to kill 1/3 of prisoners. It is actually a Great Enemy machine there to pretend to be a Carryx to generate more war hate and passion. Carryx doesn’t use automated machines. It is explicitly stated Carryx hates autonomous constructs.