Review: The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

“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.

Rating: 5/5