Humans have expanded out to the stars but the inconvenient light speed limit imposed by physics would make trade and communication across such interstellar distances impossible. However the ‘flow’ was discovered, a kind of little understood hyperspace that has allowed short cuts between locations in real space. It is this flow that has made the Interdependency Empire possible but it seems the flow is about to collapse making travel and communication between the colonies in the empire impossible. Something no one wants to believe.
After loving the early books in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series but hating the later ones, The Collapsing Empire felt like something of a return to form. Scalzi has created a plausible, if slightly unusual, political structure for the empire and its guilds and this book adequately sets the scene for those to come. His plotting is good and his characters well drawn (he has to have had enormous fun writing the slightly improbably profane Kiva, scion of one of the leading guild houses) and the story cracks along at a good pace that took little time for me to read.
Although this is a good book, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed, I do have one big grumble, a complaint I’m finding more and more common with SF books; if a book needs to be a thousand pages long then make it so, don’t write a thousand-page book and then chop it, almost arbitrarily, into several volumes. This book is only around three hundred pages long and yet it feels like it’s just set the scene for the real story to begin. Had Peter Hamilton been writing this the next volume (at least) would have joined this one in a single book. I have no problem with a long book if it needs to be long. I have huge problems with a long book being chopped into shorter ones that in themselves have no real conclusion. This seems to me to be a pure marketing tactic to make more money. Four short books in a series will always cost more than one single, longer book. But sadly this seems to be the new normal nowadays so I suppose I must learn to live with it.
4/5 stars
After loving the early books in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series but hating the later ones, The Collapsing Empire felt like something of a return to form. Scalzi has created a plausible, if slightly unusual, political structure for the empire and its guilds and this book adequately sets the scene for those to come. His plotting is good and his characters well drawn (he has to have had enormous fun writing the slightly improbably profane Kiva, scion of one of the leading guild houses) and the story cracks along at a good pace that took little time for me to read.
Although this is a good book, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed, I do have one big grumble, a complaint I’m finding more and more common with SF books; if a book needs to be a thousand pages long then make it so, don’t write a thousand-page book and then chop it, almost arbitrarily, into several volumes. This book is only around three hundred pages long and yet it feels like it’s just set the scene for the real story to begin. Had Peter Hamilton been writing this the next volume (at least) would have joined this one in a single book. I have no problem with a long book if it needs to be long. I have huge problems with a long book being chopped into shorter ones that in themselves have no real conclusion. This seems to me to be a pure marketing tactic to make more money. Four short books in a series will always cost more than one single, longer book. But sadly this seems to be the new normal nowadays so I suppose I must learn to live with it.
4/5 stars
