And as fans of his blog Whatever know, he isn't afraid to get political. As fans of Scalzi's work like Old Man's War, Redshirts, and Lock In are already aware, Scalzi is a master of action. Representatives from different royal houses fight dirty for power, even as they lose their grip on the substance that makes their interstellar empires possible. She learns that her late father has secretly been funding a Flow physicist who has determined that every planet in the Interdependency will be cut off from the Flow within the next decade.įurther Reading All the science fiction and fantasy novels you need to make it through winter In some ways, this novel feels like a zippier version of Dune. As the novel opens, our protagonist, Cardenia, recently crowned emperox of the Interdependency, has just made a nasty discovery. The problem is that the Flow, like most natural features, has a tendency to change shape over time. The result is not unlike a medieval trade guild society whose populace happens to live in domed cities, buried caves, and artificial habitats, completely dependent on trade for resources. Planets are colonized purely based on their proximity to the shoals, not on habitability. Humanity has created an entire civilization that relies on the Flow and its 'shoals,' where ships can enter and exit. Unfortunately, nobody is asking that question.

Once there, they can circumvent the unbreakable speed of light to travel between stars that are dozens of light years apart. Its member planets were once connected to Earth by the Flow, a natural feature of space-time that allows ships to enter a kind of subspace zone. The Interdependency is a thousand-year-old interplanetary trade partnership in humanity's distant future.

Illustration by Sparth, via Tor Books In his new novel The Collapsing Empire, bestselling writer John Scalzi builds a fascinating new interstellar civilization in order to destroy it.

The collapsing empire review