Review: The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi

[Russ Allbery]

The Collapsing Empire
by John Scalzi

Series:    Interdependency #1
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: March 2017
ISBN:      0-7653-8889-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     333

Cardenia Wu-Patrick was never supposed to become emperox. She had a
quiet life with her mother, a professor of ancient languages who had a
brief fling with the emperox but otherwise stayed well clear of the
court. Her older half-brother was the imperial heir and seemed to enjoy
the position and the politics. But then Rennered got himself killed
while racing and Cardenia ended up heir whether she wanted it or not,
with her father on his deathbed and unwanted pressure on her to take
over Rennered's role in a planned marriage of state with the powerful
Nohamapetan guild family.

Cardenia has far larger problems than those, but she won't find out
about them until becoming emperox.

The Interdependency is an interstellar human empire balanced on top of
a complex combination of hereditary empire, feudal guild system, state
religion complete with founding prophet, and the Flow. The Flow is this
universe's equivalent of the old SF trope of a wormhole network: a
strange extra-dimensional space with well-defined entry and exit points
and a disregard for the speed of light. The Interdependency relies on
it even more than one might expect. As part of the same complex and
extremely long-term plan of engineered political stability that created
the guild, empire, and church balance of power, the Interdependency
created an economic web in which each system is critically dependent on
imports from other systems. This plus the natural choke points of the
Flow greatly reduces the chances of war.

It also means that Cardenia has inherited an empire that is more
fragile than it may appear. Secret research happening at the most
far-flung system in the Interdependency is about to tell her just how
fragile.

John Clute and Malcolm Edwards provided one of the most famous
backhanded compliments in SF criticism in The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction when they described Isaac Asimov as the "default voice" of
science fiction: a consistent but undistinguished style that became the
baseline that other writers built on or reacted against. The field is
now far too large for there to be one default voice in that same way,
but John Scalzi's writing reminds me of that comment. He is very good
at writing a specific sort of book: a light science fiction story that
draws as much on Star Trek as it does on Heinlein, comfortably sits on
the framework of standard SF tropes built by other people, adds a bit
of humor and a lot of banter, and otherwise moves reliably and
competently through a plot. It's not hard to recognize Scalzi's
writing, so in that sense he has less of a default voice than Asimov
had, but if I had to pick out an average science fiction novel his
writing would come immediately to mind. At a time when the field is
large enough to splinter into numerous sub-genres that challenge
readers in different ways and push into new ideas, Scalzi continues
writing straight down the middle of the genre, providing the same sort
of comfortable familiarity as the latest summer blockbuster.

This is not high praise, and I am sometimes mystified at the amount of
attention Scalzi gets (both positive and negative). I think his largest
flaw (and certainly the largest flaw in this book) is that he has very
little dynamic range, particularly in his characters. His books have a
tendency to collapse into barely-differentiated versions of the same
person bantering with each other, all of them sounding very much like
Scalzi's own voice on his blog. The Collapsing Empire has emperox
Scalzi grappling with news from scientist Scalzi carried by dutiful
Scalzi with the help of profane impetuous Scalzi, all maneuvering
against devious Scalzi. The characters are easy to keep track of by the
roles they play in the plot, and the plot itself is agreeably twisty,
but if you're looking for a book to hook into your soul and run you
through the gamut of human emotions, this is not it.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. I like that voice; I read Scalzi's
blog regularly. He's reliable, and I wonder if that's the secret to his
success. I picked up this book because I wanted to read a decent
science fiction novel and not take a big risk. It delivered exactly
what I asked for. I enjoyed the plot, laughed at some of the
characters, felt for Cardenia, enjoyed the way some villainous threats
fell flat because of characters who had a firm grasp of what was
actually important and acted on it, and am intrigued enough by what
will happen next that I'm going to read the sequel. Scalzi aimed to
entertain, succeeded, and got another happy customer. (Although I must
note that I would have been happier if my favorite character in the
book, by far, did not make a premature exit.)

I am mystified at how The Collapsing Empire won a Locus Award for best
science fiction novel, though. This is just not an award sort of book,
at least in my opinion. It's book four in an urban fantasy series, or
the sixth book of Louis L'Amour's Sackett westerns. If you like this
sort of thing, you'll like this version of it, and much of the appeal
is that it's not risky and requires little investment of effort. I
think an award winner should be the sort of book that lingers, that you
find yourself thinking about at odd intervals, that expands your view
of what's possible to do or feel or understand.

But that complaint is more about awards voters than about Scalzi, who
competently executed on exactly what was promised on the tin. I liked
the setup and I loved the structure of Cardenia's inheritance of
empire, so I do kind of wish I could read the book that, say, Ann
Leckie would have written with those elements, but I was entertained in
exactly the way that I wanted to be entertained. There's real skill and
magic in that.

Followed by The Consuming Fire. This book ends on a cliffhanger, as
apparently does the next one, so if that sort of thing bothers you, you
may want to wait until they're all available.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-09-17

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>