Hey, you know what, basing an entire system of social, political and economic control on the vague, all-too-easily misinterpreted words of a single person claiming divine inspiration is probably not actually all that smart, now, is it.”
In the second book of John Scalzi’s Interdependency series, the vital link between interstellar systems – The Flow – is collapsing, and it’s very likely that all of civilization will collapse with it. Emperox Grayland II (known as Cardinia to her close friends) has come up with a plan to get humanity to work together to try to save itself: she’s announced that she’s had a “vision” of the collapse of The Flow, just like the visions of Rachela I, the founder of the Interdependency (who, the Emperox has discovered, also faked the entire thing.)
Now Cardinia just has to convince the Church, her government, and the entire military that she hasn’t lost her mind. And she also has to survive assassination attempts or coups by parties who either don’t believe the Flow is collapsing, or they do, but they see the upcoming disaster as an excuse to take control of the Interdependency for themselves.
Spoilers for Book One: The Collapsing Empire to follow.
There are a lot of moving parts in this one. Chaos = opportunity for some; after all, why worry about billions of people gradually starving to death and running out of air if you’re one of the 1% who can hoard enough supplies to stay comfortable for at least a few decades? It seems ridiculously short-sighted to me, but none of the players trying to overthrow the Emperox are thinking much further than the next generation or two, and with the rulership of the entire Interdepencency at stake it makes for quite a few competing plots.
In one book we have plots against the Emperox, plots against families, plots against different government departments. There are even people plotting against members of their own families, or at the very least using dead relatives as scapegoats. Two members of the Wu family are fighting over which one will be the next Emperox and which one will “only” be head of one of the richest families in the Interdependency. Their particular conflict ropes in executive committee members, high-ranking bishops, and of course everyone’s favorite traitors, the Nohamapetan family. Remember Nadashe Nohamapetan? She starts the book in prison for attempted assassination of the Emperox, but she’s infuriatingly confident that a little thing like a life sentence is just an inconvenience. Even more infuriating? She’s usually right. Nadashe’s mother, the Countess Nohamapetan, is even more of a conniving status-climber than her daughter is, and not even Nadashe killing her brother Amit during that assassination attempt is going to slow her down.
“…I don’t know if you’ve ever met the Countess Nohamapetan, but she’s about as sentimental as a fucking alligator.”
All of this information is delivered in Scalzi’s supremely easy-to-read style (not kidding here, I’ve breezed through both books in the series in a matter of days.) Scalzi has efficient ways of delivering exposition without making you feel like you’re attending a lecture, along with plenty of snappy dialogue, fascinating concepts about how civilizations form, and how they last (or don’t), and still with the unique ship names, including We Never Agreed To This, You Can Blame It All On Me, and my personal favorite, The Princess Is In Another Castle.
Best of all, there’s Kiva Lagos, who remains one of the best characters in the whole damn book. She uses a “fucking” in her first bit of dialogue, and she never really stops. This is a woman who swears profusely, has sex indiscriminately, is putting the screws to the Nohamapetan family partly because the Emperox told her to and partly because she’s enjoying the heck out of it, and she consistently gets all the best lines. She also routinely proves that she’s not to be messed with, and I actually looked forward to the times when someone tried to cross her, because I knew that person would be hating life by the time Kiva was done with them.
“Imagine what I will do now that I am fucking motivated.”
The book also gets amazingly dark, and with a surprising amount of violence. And I do mean surprising. Everything will be going along as usual and BAM, assassination attempt, or POW, an out-of-nowhere betrayal. Characters casually drop shocking new information into an argument, and huge life-altering events happen in the space in between paragraphs. Probably the most surprising was when the author finally let us see what happens to a ship that gets dropped out of the Flow thousands of light-years from anywhere. The description is brief (only about two pages, maybe a little less), clinical, and matter-of-fact. It’s brilliant, it’s absolutely epic. I read the whole thing through twice just so I could enjoy the chill. The space between the stars can be the most terrifying thing about the universe, and it drives home how bad it will be if entire systems – billions of people – are cut off from the supply lines that keep their artificial habitats running.
The book ends before the disaster really gets started, but before not the beginning of a new romance (possibly two; I suppose anything’s possible with Kiva), another denouement similar to the one at the end of The Collapsing Empire, the introduction of a sentient spaceship (yep) and the exploration of an area of space that’s been cut off from the Flow for centuries. Cardinia is finding that there’s a lot more about the Flow to learn, a lot more about history of the Interdependency than she’s ever been told (in a big part because neither she nor anyone else have been asking the right questions), and a lot more about the history of her closest family members than people have been admitting to. She’s surrounded herself with the brightest and most determined people, but given the sheer scope of the impending disaster it remains to be seen whether any plan they come up with will be anything more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.