Timing Is Everything: The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

The Collapsing Empire (2017)
Written by: John Scalzi
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 336 (Kindle)
Series: The Interdependency
Publisher: Tor Books

Why I Chose It: I received this book for free through Tor.com’s eBook of the Month Club and it’s been sitting in my digital library ever since. But I finally got to it, and I enjoy John Scalzi’s work, so I figured this one would be fun.

The Premise:

Our universe is ruled by physics. Faster than light travel is impossible — until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field available at certain points in space-time, which can take us to other planets around other stars.

Riding The Flow, humanity spreads to innumerable other worlds. Earth is forgotten. A new empire arises, the Interdependency, based on the doctrine that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war — and, for the empire’s rulers, a system of control.

The Flow is eternal — but it’s not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well. In rare cases, entire worlds have been cut off from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that the entire Flow is moving, possibly separating all human worlds from one another forever, three individuals — a scientist, a starship captain, and the emperox of the Interdependency — must race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse.

No spoilers.

Discussion: If you enjoyed anything John Scalzi has written, you’ll like this book. If you enjoyed Dune, you’ll probably like this book. If you enjoyed Game of Thrones, you’ll probably like this book.

In fact, I’d say this is a lot like Game of Thrones, only far more succinct, set in a science fiction world instead, and a helluva lot more fun. Not to say that Game of Thrones wasn’t fun, but The Collapsing Empire sure as hell isn’t depressing with people dying all over the place. Which seems kind of ironic given its title.

You follow several characters throughout the book before they come together in the end with the discovery of the Flow’s inevitable collapse. They each provide a distinctive perspective in this universe we’re in, not just in voice (although those are wildly distinctive, for sure), but due to their position in life as well as their location in the universe.

The scientist, Marce Claremont, is almost a fish out of water, set with the task of telling the emperox about the Flow, and an overall nice guy. He takes things very well, given that one day he’s minding his own business and the next he’s being targeted for what he knows. The starship captain, Kiva Lagos, is my favorite. She’s impatient when it comes to bullshit, enjoys a good bout of fucking (she wouldn’t call it anything else), and she’s as sharp as a tack. Watching her outwit people around her is a delight. The emperox, Cardenia Wu-Patrick, is essentially the head of all the Interdependency (the vast web of connected worlds). She was never supposed to be, but has been thrown into this position nonetheless. It gives the reader someone more relatable since she’s a regular, down-to-earth person who is suddenly surrounded by servants and guards and more excessive opulence than anyone could imagine. Not to say she isn’t smart. Given how she has been thrown into being in charge of literally everything, she handles herself very well. You get a few other viewpoints from chapter to chapter as well, which is fun and interesting depending upon who they are.

Even though the summary of the book does already tell you (as does the title) that the Flow is essentially ready to boogie on out the door, it doesn’t make it any less tense in wondering how/when the emperox is going to hear about it. There’s also the mystery of what the hell the ambitious assholes everyone found themselves fighting against were up to. What did the antagonists of this whole tale stand to gain if the empire is going to collapse? And then you find out and you think, “Oooh. Well. Oopsy for them.”

There’s a lot of — and I hesitate to use the word because it’s not like it’s hard to wade through at all — jargon used regarding Interdependency rules, regulations, and more. People citing legal actions and the escrow of funds and various things like that as they use money and power as leverage. It may sound boring, but it’s actually quite interesting and fun. Especially since all of the characters wielding those phrases will also politely tell another character to “cut the shit” or hand out a “fuck you” in the next sentence. If you’ve read John Scalzi before, you catch the drift. His writing is fun, and even in a deeply entwined trade and guild-driven system, he manages to make space business entertaining.

In Conclusion: I hadn’t even realized this was the first book in a trilogy and it wasn’t until I was 3/4 of the way through that I figured there had to be more books because there was far too much story to be told. The final book, The Last Emperox, will be released April this year. Despite my resolution and my current To Read list that also still has unread books on it, I’ll snag the next book from the library to read on lunch breaks or whenever I can sneak it in before finally picking up the last book in April. Because I want to see just how a massive space empire ends.