It starts with an interrupted mutiny, and the death of an Emperor; two unrelated events taking place in the sprawling mass of humanity that is the Interdependency.
What we start to realize though is that these are just the first steps in a dance that’s eventually going to lead to the end of the Interdependency, and possibly the extinction of the human race.
I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read one of John Scalzi’s books, but I’m very grateful that I had to read last year’s The Collapsing Empire as prep for this year’s Hugo Awards, since I flew through the entire book in a matter of days.
In a departure from the usual Star Wars/Star Trek/Let’s-Pop-Over-To-Alpha-Centauri-For-The-Afternoon sci-fi setting, Scazi has created a universe where the pivotal issue in human civilization is distance. There’s no such thing as faster-than-light travel (actual physics makes that impossible, and would you really want to hit every tiny bit of debris between you and your destination at 186 thousand miles per second?) and while humanity has colonized thousands of star systems, it’s hard to grasp just how far apart those star systems can be from each other.
Ships in this universe are designated as fivers or tenners, which refers to how many years they can sustain their crew before having to get more supplies (they also have names like Yes Sir That’s My Baby, Tell Me Another One, and Some Nerve!, which is all kinds of fun), but five or ten years doesn’t even come close to how long it takes to travel between one system and the next. (To put this into perspective, traveling from Earth to Proxima Centauri would take 81 thousand years, and that’s our closest system.)
Instead of FTL drives, the Interdependency has something called the Flow. It’s a little like wormholes, and a little like hyperspace: basically a series of extra-dimensional fields that connect points between different planets and different stars. Riding the Flow can still take months, but nothing compared to how long it would take without it. With so much of humanity living on artificial worlds that require a constant influx of supplies, the Flow doesn’t just make trade between systems possible, it’s the only thing keeping civilization alive.
So you can take it for granted that when access points to parts of the Flow start to disappear it’s a really big deal. A ship that gets dropped out of the Flow midway between two systems is as good as dead, with hundreds of crew members basically killing time until they blow up the ship, or resort to cannibalism and then blow up the ship. And that’s the least worst thing that will happen if the Flow disappears and systems are separated by a distance that not even messages can cross.
Not that any of this has happened yet. Most of the characters aren’t aware that anything is wrong at all, much less the scope of the disaster. And the people with even a little of that information have to deal with a bureaucracy that’s more interested in saving itself rather than the rest of the universe. So there’s a lot of talking in this book: spaceship captains and owners speaking with their subordinates, planetary royalty trying to wheedle favors from other nobles, the reluctant new emperox Cardinia speaking with her staff and the digital reconstruction of her deceased father. That sort of thing.
And every bit of of it is fascinating.
Cardinia having access to the memories and personalities of all the previous emperors is just one of the more unique ways that the reader learns the history of the Interdependency and all the ways that the different systems work together (or don’t, which is a lot more fun). With so many other books I’ll start a new chapter thinking, “Okay, I really need to read sixty pages today if I want to get it finished by Sunday.” Here it was more, “I can’t wait to find out how Cardina’s going to deal with the latest assassination attempt,” or “One of Ghreni’s schemes has got to blow up in his face eventually and it’s going to be beautiful to watch,” or “Yay, another Kiva chapter! Someone’s going to be hating life before the end of this one.”
Stop whining like a fucking child.”
“You could have just said, ‘I need your help.”
“All right. I need your help. Stop whining like a fucking child.”
“That’s not better.”
(Good lord, that Kiva. I can’t remember when I last enjoyed a character this much. Awful, entitled, and impossible to intimidate, every word out of that woman’s mouth is a treasure, and usually that word is “Fuck”.)
In fact all of Scalzi’s characters are believably human and wonderfully entertaining to read. Cardinia grew up thinking her older brother would be the heir to the throne, so while she takes her new role as Emperox very seriously, she also finds a lot of it pretty damn ridiculous. Marce is the son of a backwater planet count, and he has to try to convince the entire multi-world government that their entire way of life is about to disappear, knowing that at any moment he may lose his chance to go home and see is family again, forever. And the Nohamapetan family…well you may not respect how they try to take advantage of the situation, but you can certainly admire how gutsy they are about pushing their luck.
“So to sum up,” Jamies said, “you wish me to illegally transfer imperial funds to the duke so he may buy the weapons he already bought but lost due to negligence, because the person whom you have already suborned cannot do it herself, and to compensate for executing several crimes against the imperial state, you offer me nebulous, so-called rewards to be determined later, which are not actual money. Is this correct?”
The dialog is free flowing and often hilarious (one chapter is mostly a list of reasons why someone is having a bad day, and one of those reasons is a series of messages from a starship captain who’s dealing with an in-progress disaster and getting increasingly pissed off every time something else goes kablooey.) And then there were those understated and still powerful sections: Cardinia’s last few moments with her dying father, a rushed goodbye between siblings who may never see each other again, the fallout from a tragedy that happens in two sentences and changes someone’s entire world. I even found myself caring even about the nameless spear-carriers who only got a half of a page before they met their destiny (very high body count in this one).
If I had any complaints at all about this story, it’s that there’s not enough of it. This is still very early in the impending disaster, and most of civilization is still discovering (or denying) that there is an impending disaster. Some of the main plot points are resolved in a scene that could be right out of an Agatha Christie ending, but otherwise the book almost feels like just the prologue of the story. And as entertaining as this prologue has been, I’m now wishing that October would get here so I can see what happens when things really start to go wrong.