The Collapsing Empire

The premise is that faster than light travel is only possible for space ships if they enter "the Flow" at specific points and exit at specific points, like getting on and off one way buses at specific stops. The ruling house of the Interdependency maintains control by granting monopolies to specific guild houses who must produce their goods on specific planets. Thus, one planet is dependent on the monopoly goods of another planet and vice versa. And the ruling house of the Emperox collects tribute from all the other houses/planets because they control the hub of the Flow, the "central" location where most trade has to transit.

OK, so that's the setup. However, a Flow physicist on an outlying planet has figured out that the Flow is collapsing, which means that every planet has to become self sufficient beforehand. Or die.

Can the physicist get word back to the Emperox before someone else takes advantage? What if the Emperox is a bad person? What if the local duke on his backwater planet kills him first? What if the bad guys all have extremely mustache-twirly plans that the author takes great pains to make obvious to you the reader so that who is doing what is never in question and instead the only thing you have to wonder about is will the good guys execute their scheme in time?

Also, what if everyone talks the same way? What if they all start off every conversation with some diplomatic language and then a minute in everyone says "let's cut the shit and talk without pretense" and then they do.

Anyway, for once, I enjoyed a Scalzi book. It's interesting even if it's pretty shallow.

This is very much just one part of a three-part novel, which I find difficult to review in isolation. Because this site works best when people review the things they read, however, I will be adding the same review to all volumes.

John Scalzi is a nice guy writing nice SF novels.

You could almost leave it at that, really. For the sake of context, I will add a few more details to this assessment. This, like all of his novels I have read, is smoothly plotted and written, entirely unsurprising in its cliffhangers and ultimate resolution, and contains exactly one original idea. This being said, it’s an entertaining read if, at times, a bit too glib to my taste (I don’t think Scalzi has ever seen a witty repartee he didn’t like). If what you want from your SF is what I just described, you could do a lot worse than the Interdependency series.

I'm writing this review after reading the sequel of this book, which will color my opinion (in a negative way).

I have to admit that I was very hesitant to pick up this book. It's another sci-fi series by John Scalzi, and we all know what he did to his other series: flip the bird mid-book and drop his readers.
Will he just stop this series as well as soon as he gets bored with this?
Still... I had nothing better to read and had to pass the time until [a: Steven Erikson|31232|Steven Erikson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1219169436p2/31232.jpg]'s [b: Rejoice, a knife to the heart|36405688|Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart|Steven Erikson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1522055721s/36405688.jpg|58099943] came out for Audible. So I jumped in.

I liked it. It is hard to know what kind of book it is. Is it satire? The ship's names and ridiculous situations and Will Wheatons super annoying always shouty over the top narration seem to indicate that. I reminded me of the [b: The Willful Child|20518786|Willful Child|Steven Erikson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1418694657s/20518786.jpg|26112570] series, but then with a longer arc, and sloppier (very sloppy) writing.
Is is space opera? It certainly has the scope, but it feels too light and immature to be actually space opera. Maybe it's targeted at YA?

I have to talk about the (technical) writing. It's bad. Scalzi is improving, his dialogs aren't as stilted anymore as in his earlier work. There is no longer an avalanche of 'he said' 'she said' and the characters seem to be actually alive and real instead of cardboard cutouts with stiffly moving mouths.
Don't get me wrong, I like reading Scalzi for his imagination. He is a great story teller. It's just that with his earlier books I had to rinse my brain with strong soap to make everything unstick and uncross.
Imagine every advice ever given to authors about writing a story. And then blatantly ignoring said advice. That's Scalzi. The amount of info dumps, "as you know, Bob"'s, lantern hangings, etc. is staggering. This is only the first book in the series, so some of the info dumps may be excused. But after having read the second book, I'm sad to say that they seem to increase.
It pulls me out of the story every time, and that's too bad, but I like the story, over the top as it is.

After reading this first book, I gave it 4 stars out of five. I liked the story and the characters thát much. But after reading the second book, I downgraded it to 3 stars. Hope the next books won't be pulling the rating down even more.

This is a fantastic book and Wil Wheaton’s reading is superb as usual. It has been a while since I read any Scalzi books. I always mean to and then never do it. But since this is Hugo nominated this year, I kind of had to.

So the premise is that humanity managed to colonize the stars by using something called “The Flow” for FTL travel. The human empire called the Interdependency - ruled by the Emperox, and church, parliament, the guilds and the executive committee - spans about 42 star systems, however not Earth. Because sometimes the Flow changes and so contact with Earth was lost. And as one can guess from the title, more changes or rather collapse is coming to the Interdependency, which is really terrible because the name for the empire comes from each system being dependent on others because only one single system - End - has an actually human inhabitable planet.

One of the 3 major POVs is Cardinia (spellings may be off, as I listened to the book) the daughter of the late Emperox Octavian, who ascended to the throne rather surprisingly because her half-brother the crown prince had died in an accident a year earlier. Her POV is mostly about her struggles to come to grips with being the ruler of humankind more or less suddenly.

Another POV is the Lady Kiva who trades citrus fruit for her family and on her trip to End she picks up the third POV Lord Marce who is the son of a Flow physicist who has been working for the Emperox in secret, studying a theory that might cause major upheaval.

This is exactly what I expected from a Scalzi novel, entertaining, fast-paced SF with an interesting premise. Not too heavy-weight and often enough light-hearted. I am looking forward to reading the next two parts of what looks like it is going to be a trilogy.

One of my favorite features of the story was not Lady Kiva swearing a lot and fucking everyone who seems willing including the guards following her—although that too; and not the intrigues by the other nobles—although that too; but the neural network every Emperox gets implanted and what results from that.

This is definitely more space opera than hard-SF. It’s got more intrigue than Star Trek but less Force than Star Wars (but Cardinia is a space princess in a way). It does have a scientist POV but I cannot remember any several page rants on math or physics to explain a piece of the plot. No robots that I noticed. No major AI. And no zombies but a few space pirates instead! It’s high-tech but besides the Flow travel technology is not really the focus of this. There are (space) Imperial Marines but they are not shown in action (yet). Oh and no aliens. At all. Just humanity in space habitats and on one planet.