Book Review: The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

The Collapsing Empire
by John Scalzi

The Collapsing Empire is the beginning of a science fiction trilogy called The Interdependency, which was completed in April 2020. It’s a story about environmental change that’s about to kill all of human society across dozens of star systems and the politics of doing something about it. This is unabashedly an analogy to our planet’s climate change situation.

The setup is that humanity is inhabiting all of these star systems due to a series of one-way wormholes called the Flow. Most of the action takes place in the ruling system which has the most wormhole entrances and exits “Hub,” and the system that’s the hardest to reach “End.” The political body that stretches across all of these systems is called “The Interdependency” because no system is self-sustaining due to all noble families having monopolies on essential goods and services. This was set up on purpose millennia ago by one woman who wanted to force everyone to get along.

That’s all well and good until a few Flow physicists start realizing that the wormholes are about to change…and then one winks out of existence. The physicist for a major noble family believes the end result is that End is going to become the new Hub, so the family plots to take over the planet — and rule of the Interdependency — before everyone else notices. A father-son team of Flow physicists on End come to a different conclusion: the Flows are all going away, not shifting.

This means a scientist who’s great with data and not great with politics needs to tell everyone that they’re all about to die and they need to act before it’s too late, and it might already be too late. Meanwhile, the noble family who wants to take advantage of the situation doesn’t want anyone to suspect something unusual is going on, and they have no qualms about murdering their way to the top. Caught in the middle of this is a young woman who wasn’t supposed to be heir to the Interdependency, but now she’s newly in charge and low in everyone’s estimation.

But they have no idea how hard she’s willing to go to save humanity. She has something no one else does: access to every leader’s mind stretching back to the beginning.

As with all Scalzi books, this is action-packed and filled with verbal badassery. The villains are a delight. One reluctant hero uses curse words as her punctuation marks of choice. There’s more than a little connection with Herbert’s Dune books, but this is both more light-hearted for much of its tone and more hard-hitting to read because it’s so relatable to our real life.

Most major characters are not white. One major character is pansexual.

Unfortunately, the noble house of Amazon has a monopoly on the audiobooks for this series, so you can’t listen to Will Wheaton joyfully cussing his way through this series via library checkout.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the Dune series by Frank Herbert, or the Expanse series by James S.A. Corey.] [ publisher’s official Collapsing Empire web page ] | [ official John Scalzi blog ]

See Scott C.’s review of John Scalzi’s Hugo-winning novel Redshirts, on BookGuide in January 2013
See Scott C.’s review of John Scalzi’s essay collection Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, on BookGuide in January 2013

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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