Gineos is an engaging character: we’re teased about her background and political affiliations, given a solid look at her feelings and reactions in the moment, and are left thoroughly impressed with her handling of the situation. Though Scalzi’s conversational narration tells us about the Flow and its usual workings via a slightly lampshaded form of As You Know, Bob – the explanation starts with “Now, some context, here,” which situates the text as speaking directly to the reader – it’s nonetheless done in an entertaining fashion, and with that crucial context established, the rest of the scene progresses smoothly. The story begins with a prologue, and a good one at that: Captain Arullos Gineos, already dealing with a mutiny, is forced to collaborate with her mutinous crew when the Flow in which they’re travelling suddenly and impossibly spits out their ship. Because while I enjoyed a great deal about The Collapsing Empire, I couldn’t help feeling that it was, in many fundamental ways, a novel that secretly wanted to be a film script. I mention this by way of contextualising my comparative lack of familiarity with Scalzi’s style: I have a general impression of it, but nothing detailed enough to make me comfortable deciding whether The Collapsing Empire is, overall, a representative sample in terms of tone and structure. I read Old Man’s War way back in 2011 and The Ghost Brigades the following year, but after bouncing off Fuzzy Nation later in 2012, the rest of his catalogue went on my mental backburner, though due more to the sheer number of books in my TBR pile than to any dislike of his writing.

The Collapsing Empire is the first John Scalzi book I’ve read in some time, and only my third overall. But the Flow, so long assumed stable, is collapsing, threatening the survival of the entire Interdependency – and, as a consequence, of the human race. Only one habitable world exists: the planet of End, so-called because it’s the most distant realm in the Interdependency, accessible only by a single pair of Flow streams connecting it to Hub, where the Emperox rules. As the Flow exists without concern for human planetary preferences – and as the Flow route to Earth was lost centuries ago – the majority of people live underground, in planetary habitats or in space stations along these Flow routes, with trade and travel controlled by aristocratic Guild families.

In a far distant future, humanity exists in an interplanetary empire called the Interdependency, its far-flung outposts connected by the Flow: a series of natural space-time currents that facilitate fast travel between different parts of the universe.

To kick off my Shadow Clarke experience, I’ve started with John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire, a novel based on a singularly intriguing premise.

The collapsing empire series