"The humans malfunctioned long before their habitat did."
The edges and boundaries of human experience and the possibilities beyond them are the things I like best in my science fiction. I found these in spades within The Collapsing Empire, along with humor alternately dry and caustic, characters I loved and loathed, and questions both alarming and intriguing.
The Collapsing Empire is the first in a series called The Interdependency - the second, titled The Consuming Fire, is due out in October of 2018. It's a space opera set in a new universe, ostensibly hundreds of years into our future. Humanity has spread itself all over the galaxy, constrained by the exit points of the mysterious Flow through which spaceships can travel at speeds unheard-of in standard physics. Now, the Flow has begun to collapse - and we're told the Interdependency will soon follow.
The story is told through the eyes of three characters - Kiva, Cardenia, and Marce. I found Marce a little forgetable, but that's primarily because Kiva - ruthless daughter of a merchant house - is so delightfully brash, and Cardenia, being the new Emperox of the Interdependency, is in much more interesting surroundings. Marce is hardly ignorable, though, as his father's research could be the key to anyone understanding the Flow's situation in time to act.
As with all of Scalzi's novels, the writing is snappy and dialogue-heavy. When combined with the gripping story, this makes for a very fast read - so fast, in fact, that Scalzi had to write a blog post ensuring fans that it wasn't any shorter than average. It also makes for a fun audiobook, narrated by Wil Wheaton.
As I mentioned, I especially loved Kiva. She has a strident love for vehement swearing, but that's far from her only avenue of profanity - she is also frankly and openly sexual, appraising current conversation partners as near future sex partners frequently and regardless of gender. The book treats same sex relationships and dalliances with a refreshingly casual attitude. Further, this is the first book I've read that considered same sex relationships as a viable option for political marriage! (Gideon's Riders does this too, but I read The Collapsing Empire first. I am now spoiled and will never accept a lack of full consideration again!)
The science fiction I've liked best has always used a scientific conceit to ask a question about humanity. In The Collapsing Empire, the conceit is "what if faster-than-light travel wasn't even necessary?" The relevant technobabble is tongue-in-cheek, smoothing over the problem of faster-than-light travel by introducing the Flow, and then glossing over the Flow itself as too complex for proper explanation:
"This was, of course, an absurd way of looking at the Flow. The Flow is not anything close to a river—it is a multidimensional brane-like metacosmological structure that intersects with local time-space in a topographically complex manner, influenced partially and chaotically but not primarily by gravity, in which the ships accessing it don’t move in any traditional sense but merely take advantage of..."
...and so on. Despite the brevity and intentional vagueness, the Flow is a novel way to surmount the issue, and serves its narrative function neatly.
The question this book asks is what will happen when the politics of the few get in the way of the needs of the species...which is an all too topical question. Our own current political climate is in a maddeningly similar situation, and the comparison to the book is neither favorable nor hopeful, for me.
Real-world analogs aside, the story is definitely its own entity, not a direct allegory for reality. Humanity has spread itself out along spindly connections, and then staked its chances of continued survival heavily on these connections. The Interdependency is built on heavily intertwined economic, religious, and governmental systems, each of which are interested primarily in ensuring their own survival, rather than the survival of the species. The three character perspectives through which we experience the events are a neat mirror for this triumvirate - each character is interested in preserving themselves and something beyond their own skin. (I won't go so far as to say the characters each represent one of the systems of power...yet. I might be convinced of this in future books.)
This is one of my favorite science fiction books I've read in recent years, and I can't wait to read more.
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Popular Highlights in this book
“That’s the human brain,” Attavio VI said. “It creates patterns when there aren’t any. Imagines causality when there is none. Imagines a narrative where none exists. It’s in the design of the brain itself. It’s primed to lie.”Highlighted by 875 Kindle readers- “I’m continually confronted with the human tendency to ignore or deny facts until the last possible instant. And then for several days after that, too.”Highlighted by 848 Kindle readers
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About the author
The start of something big and brilliant
In The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi, humans finally leave Earth to settle the distant stars when a remarkable discovery is made. The Flow, as it’s called, is a phenomenon made up of passageways that enable FTL travel. But the Flow is scarcely understood, and soon Earth is cutoff from the rest of the Flow when it’s entry point mysteriously closes. No matter, though, because the Interdependency, a series of unified human settlements, has done well on its own, establishing artificial worlds all along the Flow’s pathways and a substantial presence on the only habitable planet along the Flow, End (called that because it literally lies at the end of the Flow). As one might imagine from the book’s title, the empire, in this case the Interdependency, is on the verge of change or, rather, collapse. [Note that none of this is a spoiler since this information is in the book’s description] Not because it’s reached it’s height of decadence or because of imminent invasion, but because the entry and egress points along the Flow are closing, cutting off each symbiotic piece of the Interdependency one by one until each settlement will be entirely on its own. Of those settlements, only End has any hope of surviving because of its natural resources. As readers, we learn of the imminent catastrophe in bits and pieces. Ultimately, the problem becomes one the new emperox of the Interdependency, Cardenia, must solve. But along the way there are mutinies, business and political backstabbing, and attempts on a certain emperox’s life. If you have an appreciation for Scalzi’s other work you should have no problem settling into the punchy, dialog-heavy writing, which actually does a fairly nice job of keeping the story moving along at a fairly fast-paced clip. Right away, we experience what happens when an entry point into the Flow begins to close. For a ship’s crew marooned outside the Flow, they face a slow death as their stores and power runs out long before they can traverse the potentially hundreds of light years distance to the next closest settlement. Space is truly vast and humans never developed FTL technology. One word of caution: if you are in any way put off by use of the F-word, then tread carefully into this one. Scalzi uses it like it’s going out of style. One character in particular has few sentences, if any, that do not contain swearing. It fits the character, but even I thought it was a bit much after a few hundred pages of it. The Collapsing Empire is an exciting read and only the first book in the Interdependency series, so there’s plenty more to come. If you liked Old Man’s War and the other books in that series, I think you’ll enjoy this one as well.
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Top reviews from other countries
- SM Kelly-MartensReviewed in Germany on January 13, 2019
Scalzi kicks it into overdrive with this series
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Paulo Sunao Shintate Jr.Reviewed in Brazil on January 17, 2019
Um livro fantástico, de um autor talentoso :-)
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