Books: The Collapsing Empire By John Scalzi (2017)

"The universe is ruled by physics and faster than light travel is not possible -- until the discovery of The Flow, an extra-dimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transport us to other worlds, around other stars. Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war -- and a system of control for the rulers of the empire. The Flow is eternal -- but it is not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well, cutting off worlds from the rest of humanity (as happened with Earth some thousand years ago). When it’s discovered that The Flow is moving, possibly cutting off all human worlds from faster than light travel forever, three individuals -- a scientist, a starship captain and the Empress of the Interdependency -- are in a race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse."

While John Scalzi’s latest space opera is bit complex –the science is real, and he tries not to dumb it down, but it does hurt the brain- the fun part is the characters, the politics and the sheer audacity of the whole series. At its core, though The Interdependency series (apparently originally two books, but was expanded to three) is about the fall of a civilization and the realization that that it can’t be stopped. Thus the flow (if you’ll excuse the phrase) of the tale is about who’ll control End –the evil or the semi-evil. I also felt the best example of understanding The Flow was make them wormholes like the one seen on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine mixed with the Barzan wormhole from the TNG episode The Price and its semi-sequel episode featured on VOY episode, False Profits. 

As with Scalzi’s other writings, it’s a witty book full of characters who, while charming, are all basically assholes. Of course, some are worse than others, and there are a few morally good folks, but all of them have potty mouths and use sex as political points. Political machinations abound here, and while I’m not fond of these themes, it still handled rather well here.

What works –beyond the humor- is that despite everyone not giving a “fuck” about anything, despite the politicking, despite the fact that there is no one really good here, you end up rooting for the House of Wu to win it all. We’ll see with book 2, coming up next.