A review by xoa
God's War by Kameron Hurley
1.0
I'm struggling thinking of how to properly articulate my thoughts on this one. I did not like anything about this book, it took me a very long time to read, and I physically rolled my eyes multiple times. At the same time, I don't think it's a bad book, per se.
There is a particular genre of sci-fi TV show which at this point makes up almost all sci-fi on the Syfy channel: a ragtag group of space criminals/bounty hunters who are hardened killers but have a special bond with each other and mean well deep down. As far as I can tell, Firefly is the root cause of this - ironic considering it got canceled.
God's War hews very closely to this formula; it even has a scene where Nyxnissa, the hardboiled whiskey-drinking captain, is asked to disarm and produces a comedic number of hidden weapons from her person, a gag that I have seen repeated so many times since I was a child that it has long since stopped being funny to me.
I hate this subgenre of science fiction.
God's War also takes quite a bit of inspiration from Space Westerns (which I hate) and from dieselpunk and steampunk fiction (which I hate). It has a central M/F romance, which I hate.
So, even setting aside the specifics of God's War and its execution, writing, story, etc: at its core, this is not a book for me. I don't think there's any meat that could be added onto the skeleton of this book that would have pleased me, so it's hard to feel like my more specific complaints are particularly meaningful.
That said, I have a lot of specific complaints.
The protagonist Nyxnissa is supremely unpleasant. I don't think a main character has to be good or nice or likable! I don't think "the protagonist is deeply flawed" is an inherently bad thing and it is often something that I enjoy very much. However, there are certain circumstances and plot structures in which a Very Terrible protagonist is not a good fit.
Nyx's crew have no reason to be loyal to her. No one has any reason to even tolerate her; she insists frequently, out loud and in the narrative, that she is very good at her job, but this isn't shown to be the case at all. We see her fail a job spectacularly and get fired and then arrested, fail another job, get kidnapped twice, and get several people around her kidnapped and murdered due to sheer incompetence. In one scene she thinks to herself that she is very good at driving and then immediately crashes her car into a tree.
It's hard to believe that anybody would want to hire her for anything important when she is not only demonstrably bad at her job but also really really obnoxious and an alcoholic. It's unclear why anyone would agree to work for her in the first place besides being extremely desperate, and it's even more unclear why they would remain loyal to her or have any affection for her whatsoever.
The only gay character, Taite, is brutally murdered; his murder is not particularly plot-important, because he is not particularly plot-important. There are plenty of bi characters who don't get murdered, but there isn't actually any f/f or m/m romance besides Taite and his one-scene boyfriend.
The brutal and cruel binary gender system in the book would be a really interesting framework in which to explore transness and gender nonconformity, but it doesn't come up ever.
The pacing of the book is clunky and strange. There's a whole long sequence at the beginning before Nyx gets arrested that is totally unnecessary and out of place, which is a weird way to start a book.
People spit on the floor a lot. Like, a lot? It got to be distracting, actually, how often people were spitting all over the place. There was also a lot of people drinking whiskey and putting their boots up on tables; it's that kind of thing. I was strongly reminded of a dieselpunk piece I once tried to read in which the main character would flick his cigarette onto the ground multiple times a scene just to establish how GRITTY and NOIR the whole thing was. Very tiresome.
The worldbuilding wasn't explained much and I didn't understand a lot of how things worked, but most of it wasn't especially important, so... whatever, I guess? It was still distracting how often details or elements of the world would be referenced and then not explained. A particularly egregious one was the revelation that Taite's mother made a habit of fucking dogs?? Shapeshifters having sex with animals while in animal form was not otherwise mentioned before or after this, it's implied by the context that her dog-fucking is somehow related to her "political beliefs" (???????), and Taite specifically mentions it as something he doesn't think is particularly bad or weird. Like... WHAT? It is never brought up again, so I guess it wasn't important?? SEEMS IMPORTANT TO ME?
I still don't really know what "reconstituting" means and why Nyx seems to have been brought back from the dead but nobody else who dies gets brought back. I assume that beheading someone means they can't be "reconstituted," and that bugs are involved somehow.
I could probably go on indefinitely, as there was really not anything I liked about this book, but I don't really... uh... care? I finished it and I won't be continuing the series.
I've got a couple of other Kameron Hurley books on my to-read list that seem like they'll be more up my alley, and I'm still going to get to those.
There is a particular genre of sci-fi TV show which at this point makes up almost all sci-fi on the Syfy channel: a ragtag group of space criminals/bounty hunters who are hardened killers but have a special bond with each other and mean well deep down. As far as I can tell, Firefly is the root cause of this - ironic considering it got canceled.
God's War hews very closely to this formula; it even has a scene where Nyxnissa, the hardboiled whiskey-drinking captain, is asked to disarm and produces a comedic number of hidden weapons from her person, a gag that I have seen repeated so many times since I was a child that it has long since stopped being funny to me.
I hate this subgenre of science fiction.
God's War also takes quite a bit of inspiration from Space Westerns (which I hate) and from dieselpunk and steampunk fiction (which I hate). It has a central M/F romance, which I hate.
So, even setting aside the specifics of God's War and its execution, writing, story, etc: at its core, this is not a book for me. I don't think there's any meat that could be added onto the skeleton of this book that would have pleased me, so it's hard to feel like my more specific complaints are particularly meaningful.
That said, I have a lot of specific complaints.
The protagonist Nyxnissa is supremely unpleasant. I don't think a main character has to be good or nice or likable! I don't think "the protagonist is deeply flawed" is an inherently bad thing and it is often something that I enjoy very much. However, there are certain circumstances and plot structures in which a Very Terrible protagonist is not a good fit.
Nyx's crew have no reason to be loyal to her. No one has any reason to even tolerate her; she insists frequently, out loud and in the narrative, that she is very good at her job, but this isn't shown to be the case at all. We see her fail a job spectacularly and get fired and then arrested, fail another job, get kidnapped twice, and get several people around her kidnapped and murdered due to sheer incompetence. In one scene she thinks to herself that she is very good at driving and then immediately crashes her car into a tree.
It's hard to believe that anybody would want to hire her for anything important when she is not only demonstrably bad at her job but also really really obnoxious and an alcoholic. It's unclear why anyone would agree to work for her in the first place besides being extremely desperate, and it's even more unclear why they would remain loyal to her or have any affection for her whatsoever.
The only gay character, Taite, is brutally murdered; his murder is not particularly plot-important, because he is not particularly plot-important. There are plenty of bi characters who don't get murdered, but there isn't actually any f/f or m/m romance besides Taite and his one-scene boyfriend.
The brutal and cruel binary gender system in the book would be a really interesting framework in which to explore transness and gender nonconformity, but it doesn't come up ever.
The pacing of the book is clunky and strange. There's a whole long sequence at the beginning before Nyx gets arrested that is totally unnecessary and out of place, which is a weird way to start a book.
People spit on the floor a lot. Like, a lot? It got to be distracting, actually, how often people were spitting all over the place. There was also a lot of people drinking whiskey and putting their boots up on tables; it's that kind of thing. I was strongly reminded of a dieselpunk piece I once tried to read in which the main character would flick his cigarette onto the ground multiple times a scene just to establish how GRITTY and NOIR the whole thing was. Very tiresome.
The worldbuilding wasn't explained much and I didn't understand a lot of how things worked, but most of it wasn't especially important, so... whatever, I guess? It was still distracting how often details or elements of the world would be referenced and then not explained. A particularly egregious one was the revelation that Taite's mother made a habit of fucking dogs?? Shapeshifters having sex with animals while in animal form was not otherwise mentioned before or after this, it's implied by the context that her dog-fucking is somehow related to her "political beliefs" (???????), and Taite specifically mentions it as something he doesn't think is particularly bad or weird. Like... WHAT? It is never brought up again, so I guess it wasn't important?? SEEMS IMPORTANT TO ME?
I still don't really know what "reconstituting" means and why Nyx seems to have been brought back from the dead but nobody else who dies gets brought back. I assume that beheading someone means they can't be "reconstituted," and that bugs are involved somehow.
I could probably go on indefinitely, as there was really not anything I liked about this book, but I don't really... uh... care? I finished it and I won't be continuing the series.
I've got a couple of other Kameron Hurley books on my to-read list that seem like they'll be more up my alley, and I'm still going to get to those.