But the Flow is collapsing now, and while those in charge are doing their best to try to keep panic from arising, convince people that the danger is real, and make plans for what’s to come, there are plenty of others who see the collapse as a way to gain power, control, and wealth – and are more than willing to do so. To make a long story short, in Empire, Scalzi introduced us to the Interdependency, a series of human colonies and inhabited planets scattered throughout space, held together by a sort of space-time river called the Flow, which allowed humanity to travel among these scattered worlds. In its broadest terms, the Interdependency is about the collapse of a massive space empire, not through politics or through evolution, but through uncontrollable disaster. Now, though, I’ve read the other two volumes in the series – The Consuming Fire and The Last Emperox – and what I’ll say is that they help me see how The Collapsing Empire wasn’t really a prologue at all – it’s just that the Interdependency series wasn’t really what I thought it was…and ultimately, what it is isn’t as interesting as what I wish it was, as unfair as that is to the series. It was a fun and engaging read, most definitely, but one that ended leaving me feeling like the whole book was a prologue to the story Scalzi really wanted to tell – and to spend a third of a series on lead-up felt like a bad choice. About a month back, I read The Collapsing Empire, the first book in John Scalzi’s Interdependency series.
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