Review: The Faith of Beasts, By James S.A. Corey
by
Stuart Holland
There’s nothing like a long plane journey to power through a significant portion of a book in a single sitting. And spending that long with a book at once definitely enhances the experience: you remember more of the specific details between scenes and catch callbacks that you otherwise would’ve missed in shorter daily sessions.
The Faith of Beasts though, is a tough book emotionally to dive into like that. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredibly good book. But it is also bleak. Like holy shit. You think you’ve read about terrible things happening to fictional people, until you see the long form existential dread the situations this book puts its characters in.
From a sci-fi premise perspective, I haven’t seen one quite like this. Humanity often struggles against its foes in sci-fi. Sometimes humanity is the big imperial villain. But this series posits: what if we just lost? Like, immediately. Which, given the disparity in technological capabilities of a vast star-spanning empire and a single early space age planet, is quite a reasonable outcome.
The Carryx, said empire, are both bizarre and consistent. They clearly operate by rules that neither the characters nor the reader fully understand. And the whole story also exists within a larger context that now in the second book, we’re starting to scratch the surface of.
Who is the deathless enemy? Who made the swarm? Where did the humans from Anjiin come from? How did they become separated from their progenitors?
All questions that would contextualize the brutal reality that the characters live in the present day of the book. The emergence of the
You need to be ready to read The Faith of Beasts. But if you are, it’s an incredibly well done story.
