I remember the first time I read about the colonial history of Puerto Rico, where I was born.

It changed me forever.

Passed to the United States in 1898 after the end of the Spanish-American war, Puerto Rico was a fertile jewel of the Caribbean. Its soil was productive, it wasn’t far from the mainland, and it could yield exotic crops like coffee and sugarcane that the US could not produce on its own.

The oppression that followed was motivated by economics. The island’s autonomy, resources and local control were steadily stripped away to serve a Wall Street hungry for profits. A place that was once agriculturally self-sufficient became completely dependent on imports, as soil was dedicated exclusively to the cash crops and profits of distant corporations.

Puerto Rico wasn’t broken for no reason. It was taken because its labor and resources had value. This animated decades of conflict, trauma and economic squalor. In the most painful way possible, this explained so much of what, in childhood, had felt so inexplicable.

In their book and television series The Expanse, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—“James S.A. Corey”—continue in the tradition of George R.R. Martin, spinning a tale of war and conquest informed by economic incentive. It makes the stories both relatable and instructive: their engine is based on systems and pitfalls we can see in our own lives.

It’s to their credit that in their new series, The Captive’s War, they continue the lesson.

Even if it is, at times, a grueling march.

Why are you doing this to me?

The Mercy of Gods starts us off and I have to warn you that this is not a very fun time. Which is not to say that it is time wasted.

But there’s a lot here that hurts because it’s so clearly drawn from human history. This is a story of conquest, slavery and imperial brutality.

The book spends explores the subject of humans as chattel, including clear parallels to the Middle Passage experience of the Atlantic slave trade.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you that there isn’t a happy ending here. At least not in book one of the series. Our characters are subject to vast and overwhelming forces, and they have neither the tools nor the context to fight off their imperial oppressor.

Sometimes the good guys don’t prevail against the empire. Sometimes the good guys are swallowed up like a whale eating krill.

History has many stories where empires behave with impunity, getting away with their cruelty and exploitation, for decades or centuries. Slavery, colonialism, the destruction of indigenous peoples… there’s not a lot of silver lining to find there. Just blood, sadness and generational trauma.

Because science fiction is about truth without preconception

As a vehicle for how the world works, I think this book delivers. I’ll be honest: I wanted to bail multiple times.

I was mad at Ty and Daniel for making me read something so sad and brutal, so darkly drawn from a past I’d rather us leave behind. I was mad that they weren’t using their considerable skill for storytelling to do something… brighter.

At the same time, the pages kept turning. I always wanted to know what happened next. With so many books and episodes to their credit, this team surely knows how to keep us engaged.

And by the end: they got me. By the end, the mirror they held up not just to history, but to the present, was devastating.

Instructive.

Daniel and Ty spend four hundred pages presenting an indictment against all of the modern world. The arrangements we tolerate, the atrocity we look past, the economically-driven cruelty we’re born into… the book is a searing rebuke of all of it.

We should be outraged. We should be fighting the sense of constant precarity and exploitation we see everywhere. Our utility should not be the measure of the dignity we enjoy.

But like the characters in this story, we are outnumbered, outgunned, and so very tired. We just want to make it through without losing too much of what we love.

Meanwhile, we’re cells in a body that doesn’t especially care if any one of us lives or dies. It just wants to keep eating and growing.

Dammit, buy the book and survive its pages if you can.