Published March 22, 2017 by Tom Doherty Associates.
ISBN:
978-1-5098-3508-9
Copied ISBN!
4 stars
(139 reviews)
In the far future, humanity has left Earth to create a glorious empire. Now this interstellar network of worlds faces disaster – but can three individuals save their people?
The empire’s outposts are utterly dependent on each other for resources, a safeguard against war, and a way its rulers can exert control. This relies on extra-dimensional pathways between the stars, connecting worlds. But ‘The Flow’ is changing course, which could plunge every colony into fatal isolation.
A scientist will risk his life to inform the empire’s ruler. A scion of a Merchant House stumbles upon conspirators seeking power. And the new Empress of the Interdependency must battle lies, rebellion and treason. Yet as they work to save a civilization on the brink of collapse, others have very different plans …
Do you enjoy reading about super-rich assholes posturing at each other, engaging in dominance displays, threats, murder, and saying one thing but meaning another? If so, this is the book/series for you! (If not, you will probably be bored. There's technically some worldbuilding and characters and whatnot in here, but they're pretty much buried under the scheming and power grabs.)
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 …
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.
starts a little ehhh but picks up about half way in. Turns into a really rich and exciting political intrigue space opera thing. Super fun and really fast read!
THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE is a quippy sci-fi epic about the end of an era and the pivot from archaic relevance to necessity as the interstellar Flow between planets collapses.
All the characters were quippy and witty in this way that started to make them all feel the same. The overall effect was to make it so Cardenia was the only one who actually stood out, but that’s mostly because she’s new to her position, out of her depth, and knows it. Everyone had schemes and machinations that they were totally sure would definitely work out well for them. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t, but their smug self-confidence was frustrating when it was coming from every character at once. I will admit that there a few characters who are so insufferable that I might enjoy watching their downfall in later books, but I’ll be totally fine if I don’t read …
THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE is a quippy sci-fi epic about the end of an era and the pivot from archaic relevance to necessity as the interstellar Flow between planets collapses.
All the characters were quippy and witty in this way that started to make them all feel the same. The overall effect was to make it so Cardenia was the only one who actually stood out, but that’s mostly because she’s new to her position, out of her depth, and knows it. Everyone had schemes and machinations that they were totally sure would definitely work out well for them. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t, but their smug self-confidence was frustrating when it was coming from every character at once. I will admit that there a few characters who are so insufferable that I might enjoy watching their downfall in later books, but I’ll be totally fine if I don’t read any more of this series.
The Emperox's family and various places have Chinese names and, as far as I can tell as a non-Chinese person, that's the extent of it. They could have been completely made-up sci-fi names and it would have the same effect on the plot and characters. I mention it because there's a trend of borrowing Asian aesthetics in sci-fi and elsewhere without actually having it matter to the story, and this seems to be yet another in that vein. It actually made it harder for me to track what was going on because every time they said something was happening in Xi'an I had to remember they meant a place not on Earth.
There's one queer character, I'll get to her in a minute. There are, however, several characters commenting on how being interested in a same-sex relationship would be totally fine... it's just not them. This is most memorable with the Emperox, who is being pressured into marriage with a guy but the political stuff could be equally satisfied if she married his sister... alas she's not gay and she doesn't like the guy so she has to figure out another solution. That she doesn't like the sister either is true but not nearly as relevant in the framing.
It felt abrupt in several places, using surprising content (whether sexual or violent) for shock value. There’s a character who is everything I typically dislike about a classic male captain who is self-important and uses sex to control his crew and manipulate power dynamics… except she’s a woman. It turns out I dislike this kind of character no matter what their gender and I found her to be off-putting. She wields sex in a way that likely isn’t technically rape, and isn’t presented as rape in the text, but also doesn’t feel like the other parties are enthusiastically consenting. "Likely isn't technically rape" is not a sentence I like as an accurate description of a scene, since it indicates that the text has allowed to be ambiguous something that shouldn't be since sex and sexual assault clearly aren't intended to be main themes. It wasn’t graphic, but it was consistent, feeling like for every X pages of conversation she had to fuck someone. I appreciate the sex-positive atmosphere, but it cemented her in my brain as “captain who fucks”, and made her less interesting overall. It didn’t help at all that her introduction is mid-fuck with a subordinate who has basically no dialogue and may as well have been a sex toy for all they added to the scene, as all the conversation was between the captain and someone who entered the room to speak with her. I don’t mean “subordinate” in a sub/dom sense, I mean that she is fucking a crew member over whom she has a whole lot of power as the captain. She's also one of two queer characters, since later in the book she's confined and fucks the woman guarding her. "Asshole captain who fucks regardless of gender" certainly is queer rep, and in a context where she's just one of many queer characters that could feel more okay, but instead it feels like she's fitting the biphobic stereotype where liking more than one gender is equated with extreme promiscuity.
There's a reveal that could have been really cool if the same information had been presented in a different order. Someone has a theory that's (so far) correct, and someone else is incorrect. By the time we learn what the incorrect person thinks they're already established as an odious person and there's no emotional weight to finding out they were wrong. It explains their earlier actions, but otherwise is strange and feels pointless. I think it would have been more interesting to have them presented earlier as competing theories and have it unknown who was right until much later. Instead they're just wrong, and uninteresting in the process.
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 …
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.
A blunt, sweary take on the end of an empire, think Armando Ianucci's Dune. Guilds, Noble Houses, Emperors and a rebellion on a miserable planet, but instead of a fight to control the means of FTL travel, it's just going away altogether whether anyone believes it or not coughclimatechangecough.
It's a fun read that's eerily prescient in some places given it was written '15-'16, and world (universe?) building is decent, but there's a lack of subtlety that takes the edge off. I liked how the characters don't quite have all of the right information at any one point in time, but none of the skullduggery is particularly surprising. Will probably read the rest eventually.
Scalzi does dialogue excellently! I'm not sure I'll grab the next, this one was good but I didn't finish it super in love with any of the characters, so we'll see.
If you love hard to pronounce names and the word, 'fuck', you'll love this book.
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 …
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 …
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.
Review of 'The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency Book 1)' on Goodreads
3 stars
Double-dealing, fast-talk ing foul mouths are always trying to run the universe, and it is up to the pure of heart to prevent them from doing so with their good intentions.
Overall, an enjoyable read, almost a confection in how lightly it treats intrigue and sabotage and murder, but engaging in its twists and turns. It even manages to make sociopathically self-centred and greedy characters somewhat sympathetic, even if only in relief.
It felt like it ended a little too soon, which perhaps doe the job of setting me up as a reader (buyer) of the next book in the series.
Ciencia ficción más política de lo que se suele encontrar, con poca acción literal pero un ritmo bastante algo. Aunque es un libro corto, es una muy buena primera parte, dejando el conflicto abierto a la espera de que detone todo en el siguiente.
A very satisfying story, with many moving parts and a clear logic to its moves. I doesn't need a sequel, but it sure sounds like there may be one, and it will have to be even more clever.
