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.