John Scalzi wraps up The Interdependency trilogy this year with The Last Emperox.
The interstellar phenomenon known as The Flow is disappearing, meaning the thousands of artificial habits that make up the Interdependency will soon be cut off from any source of necessary materials. And food. And eventually air.
Emperox Grayland II is trying to find a way to save billions of people, while an outside group is trying to grab all the power they can before civilization collapses. And the collapse of civilization is a given now; one way or another the Interdependency is going to end.
There are just a few steps in between then and now.
“Let’s be clear about what’s going on,” Deran Wu said. “It’s the end of civilization as we know it. And it’s going to be great for business.”
For anyone wanting to get into this trilogy, this is not kind of series where you can jump in on Book 3. This is a complex universe; just the science of The Flow has already taken two books to explain, and there’s still more to learn. The Emperox line has gone on for a thousand years now, the current Emperox has had many many conversations with holographic simulations of the previous Emperoxes in the Memory Room, and the political maneuvering and backstabbing between the government, the dominant religion, and most of the noble families is a thing to behold. The background on just the Nohamapetan Family’s attempts to overthrow the government takes up most of one eleven-page chapter to explain.
And the reason why that chapter worked so well for me is because it’s narrated by Nadashe Nohamapetan, political opportunist and backstabber supreme. On the run after her (second) attempted coup, hiding out in a filthy stateroom in possibly the worst spaceship in existence, Nadashe has had nothing to do except dwell obsessively on everything she’s tried to do in order to become the next Emperox, how exactly it all went wrong, and who she’s going to make suffer for it. It’s one hell of a way to deliver exposition. Nadashe isn’t the most likable character, but she’s impressively single-minded in her drive to get Grayland II out of the way, and it’s always fun to see things from inside her hornet’s nest of a mind.
But more than anything else, Nadashe hated Grayland’s persistent unwillingness to simply die, whether from bombs or runaway shuttlecraft or explosive decompression into the vast depths of space, or, hell, she was not picky, a wodge of pie crust stuck in the trachea or something banal like that. Pie crusts would do!
The chapters told from Grayland II’s point of view are calmer, even while she’s dealing with the impossible problem of twenty billion people in the Interdependency and exactly one planet that can support life. Cardenia is a very likeable, down-to-earth kind of person who hadn’t planned on becoming Emperox, so there’s an interesting balance between her private persona (likes pie, finds the “royal we” form of speaking necessary but ridiculous, enjoying her new relationship with the scientist Marce ) and her public persona (imposing and unflappable, every single moment of her day taken up with one meeting or another, having to figure out how to save billions of her subjects while, oh yeah, her most powerful subjects keep trying to murder her.)
You might think that the end of civilization is a pretty stupid time to be jockeying for power but, well, think about some current disaster or another and how hard it’s been to convince most people to inconvenience themselves in even the smallest way in order to help their fellow humans. Now imagine trying to convince the wealthy and powerful people to do anything else other than use all their money to put themselves into the safest and most comfortable place possible, billions of lesser people be damned. Scalzi does almost too good a job at one point of describing the situation, because he has Kiva Lagos summarize the attitude of pretty much every antagonist in the book in one short paragraph.
As far as Kiva could tell, whenever selfish humans encountered a wrenching, life-altering crisis, they embarked on a journey of five distinct stages:
1. Denial.
2. Denial.
3. Denial.
4. Fucking Denial.
5. Oh shit everything is terrible grab what you can and run.
(Parallels to any current ongoing disaster are of course completely up to the reader to draw. And they’re also dead on.)
(Also, yes, I have to spend more time talking about Kiva, who still remains my favorite character in the whole series. The word “fuck” is literally the second word out of her mouth in the book. She still has the same “take no prisoners” attitude, although now she has a girlfriend who loves that, and everything else about her. You absolutely can’t ever count Kiva out; even if you have her tied to a chair with a gun pointed at her then you’d still better make sure she hasn’t already bribed the gunman. And she takes everything, literally everything, very fucking personally.)
Scalzi has some interesting thoughts about how good humanity is at deciding that a huge, civilization-wide problem can in fact be pushed aside as someone else’s problem. And there are constant questions about morality and ethics. Some people might think “the ends justifies the means” is a slippery slope. But really, if you’re trying to save everybody, basically the entire human race, can you really rule out anything in order to do it? Would you really put your own morality against the fate of billions?
All of that high-concept discussion is punctuated by some really shocking deaths. The book starts with a surface-to-air missile attack against Nadashe’s hilariously-inept brother Ghreni (complete with an itemized list of what was going through Ghreni’s mind in the seconds that his groundcar was flipping over from the explosion) and things keep escalating. There may not be a death every chapter, but there’s enough that you’d think you’d get used to the random assassination, kidnapping, or poisoning, but it always caught me by surprise since death can literally jump out at you in the middle of a sentence.
I still love the rapid fire dialog in this series, the surprisingly new types of scenes (the simulation of a centuries-old former king and a hologram containing all the knowledge of the previous Emperoxes having a conversation about free will inside the virtual reproduction of a long-gone palace), the spaceship names (my favorite is a tossup between That’s Just Your Opinion, Sir and This Indecision’s Bugging Me), the sweet and bittersweet romances, a truly epic speech from Kiva and an ending that, well, I don’t know if Gordian Knot is the right analogy for the way Scalzi wraps things up, but it’s close. There are some pretty brutal decisions made that get us to the end of the Interdependency, and I wondered exactly how necessary some of them were. One thing I do know for sure, it’s very satisfying to see a universe where there are actual consequences for the people who pick the worst possible leader just because they think they’ll get something out of it.