Sunday, May 19, 2019

The Collapsing Empire (John Scalzi)

The Collapsing Empire
The Interdependency series, Book 1
John Scalzi
Tor
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)


DESCRIPTION: In time almost lost to record and memory, humans reached out from their insignificant homeworld and discovered the Flow, a "current" enabling faster-than-light travel... but, like a river of sorts, ships can only get "on" or "off" at certain "shoal" points. Though the Flow connections to and from Earth were lost generations ago, the human Interdependency thrives, a network of worlds spread across hundreds of light years ruled by the emperox, the church, and the merchant guild monopolies that keep each colony dependent on the others for survival. For all that rides on the Flow, however, few have bothered to study and understand it. It's always been there for humans to exploit, after all, and surely it always will be.
Recent disruptions in Flow transit have created shipboard rumors, but nobody in the upper echelons seems to be listening. Too many people in power have too much money riding on the status quo remaining status quo. But the rise of a new and unprepared emperox, a power grab by the Nohamapaten guild, a rebellion on the far-flung world of End, and a secret researcher's chilling conclusions will force the Interdependency to face the one thing it never wanted to see: the unstoppable collapse of the Flow network, leading to humanity's inevitable extinction.

REVIEW: In part, I admit that this book is a victim of timing. I read it as my nation and our world are facing down apparent inevitable collapses which have been coming, warned about and ignored for years, decades, generations even... and I'm watching as, like the people running the Interdependency, those in charge (and arguably most responsible for us standing on the brink) choose a profitable extinction over costly survival. (In the afterword, Scalzi claims that his choice of title, The Collapsing Empire, was not intended as a deliberate commentary on current affairs, but one has to wonder if there wasn't some subconscious nudging at work.) So, despite this being a humorous (if somewhat blackly humorous) take on empire building gone mad and ignorance/wishful thinking trampling science and fact until it's quite literally too late, at times I had to force myself to laugh. It didn't necessarily help that I never connected with most of the characters, or a world that was blatantly built to profit the few at the expense of the many (and the now at the expense of the future.) There's also a minor flaw in the overall plot, in that this is clearly just a lead-in to a larger series; the ending feels incomplete and a trifle dissatisfying, without much of an in-book arc to conclude. There's some sharp commentary and clever (occasionally curse-heavy and crude) humor, but ultimately I felt no compulsion to read onward. The whole just struck a little too close to my reality, I fear.

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