God’s War

This novel is big and intense, albeit slow going at the beginning. When I read Kameron Hurley’s Big Idea post at Whatever, this was the part that grabbed me:

Thing was, Nyx isn’t the sort who likes to be used. So when the inevitable bounty hunter story starts, we are not dealing with bounty hunters as we know them anymore. We’re not in a world we can immediately recognize. The day is nearly thirty hours long. The suns give everybody cancer. Nobody can remember a time without war. Bugs power the world’s technology and make up the primary food source. Magicians build weapons of war. The world is a contaminated ruin, and most folks die young.

But it’s a world of intensely passionate and powerful people, the kind of people we imagine could be great heroes, avengers. Or monsters.

That’s what God’s War is about. A world at war. The people who police it. The joy and terror and fear and awe of living on after the end of the apocalypse, when everybody says the world has ended… when the war has just begun.

I dug the idea of it being based on Assyrian law and generations-long wars and their impact on a society that’s so far removed (and yet at the same time, not so far) from our own. Hurley does a great job of establishing atmosphere and dropping you into wholesale (bumps, bruises and disorientation) into her planet. As I said before, it starts slow and part of that is getting your bearings but once you’re oriented it takes off. You get pulled in to the cultural conflict and character backstory and complicated political agendas – not to mention casual, not-so-casual violence.

Part of the reason I found it so engrossing is that it’s not so entirely foreign that you can’t imagine how a society gets there. The violence and consequence are nothing less than biblical and if, like me, you grew up trying to sort out the contradiction of the Old vs. New Testament this makes a compelling read. Other than the bug tech and casual interaction with aliens, there are parts of the world where this kind of bloody, destructive action and generational war/hatred goes on today. It’s a view on violence and its impact on how people function that you don’t always see in fiction and makes you re-evaluate the news you’re watching. Smart, engaging fiction. Hard to beat.