There’s maybe just a smidge too little thinking time given to the reader here.īecause by the last few pages I found myself questioning whether what House Nohamapetan was doing was really so bad, or even so very different from what anyone else was doing. On the other, I quite like being thrown into stunningly choreographed encounters without warning.
On the one hand, I prefer to be given the time to care about the world, the events and the people I’m reading about. In another book, by another author, this story would’ve been two hundred plus pages longer and have unfolded at a more sedate pace. Everyone is sassy and everything is done on the run. In everything I’ve read of Scalzi’s the dialogue has always been great, and I love the snarky back and forth that dominates here, dragging the reader along with it even when we’d maybe prefer to have sat with a character or piece of world-building for just a little while longer. Most notably, the dastardly House of Nohamapetan (moustache-twiddlers the lot of ‘em) proves itself dangerous to our new Emperox and anyone else who gets in the way and it’s their shenanigans that take up the most page space in The Collapsing Empire.Īll of the characters are awesome, whether incidental or main players (and it’s very satisfying to see women everywhere).
Although not everyone has the same information, of course. In this first volume of the trilogy alone there is a breakneck barrage of political manoeuvrings and assassination attempts as various wealthy members of the guilds act upon information received in order to reap maximum profit. Add to this mix that the newly crowned Emperox of the Interdependency, Cardenia Wu-Patrick, wasn’t ever expecting to inherit what should have been her half-brother’s position and is, on top of that, a nice person, and Scalzi has thrown all the ingredients for disaster into the pot.įasten your seatbelts. The theory behind the Interdependency is that all pockets of humanity survive by relying upon one another, and so various guilds hold monopolies on different products like, say, citrus fruits, a particular breed of animal and all its associated products, or weapons manufacture, just to give three examples mentioned in passing in this first book.īut now the Flow is collapsing and the Interdependency faces failure as, one by one, the worlds will be cut off from one another and from available resources and left to fend for themselves. We now live mostly on space habitats and lifeless planets, scattered across space and joined only by the Flow – the bit of science that allows space travel to happen in weeks and months instead of decades and centuries. Humanity has moved out into the universe, lost Earth and formed the Interdependency.
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