A Sense of Doubt blog post #1907 - Preparing to read THE LAST EMPEROX - synopses of THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE and THE CONSUMING FIRE - spoilers!
Even though John Scalzi's The Last Emperox was released weeks ago, I am just now getting ready to start reading it, via the audio book narrated by the wonderful Wil Wheaton.
As such, I was trying to decided if I would first re-listen to both previous books -- The Collapsing Empire and The Consuming Fire -- or just one or consumer synopses and go straight to the new book. When The Consuming Fire came out last year, I re-listened to the first book because it was just one book. But two books?
I have been assembling reviews and summaries to refresh my memory as I get ready to read. As of this writing, having found an extensive plot summary of the first book, I am only considering re-reading the second and only if I cannot find robust summaries of it.
And yes, so I have decided to re-read (via audio) the second book The Consuming Fire. I chose not to re-read the first book, The Collapsing Empire, for a fourth time. These summaries and reviews refreshed my memory sufficiently.
BEWARE. AHEAD LIES SPOILERS!
So, lots of reviews and summaries here.
Though every one is entitled to his or her opinion, I was very irked by Oren Ashkenazi who runs a blog called Mythcreants and his opinions of John Scalzi's book The Collapsing Empire. I was tempted to write to him and tell him off. His opinion as stated is very noxious and seems unfair.
He seems to miss the whole point of the book. He's very critical of multi-point of view books as Scalzi's book switches from Cardenia's POV to Kiva's POV. Is this something we writers have to be worried that readers will not appreciate or be able to follow? Can we not assume that readers "grok" the whole multiple POV thing these days as a standard structure of modern fiction, especially SF and Fantasy fiction?
Often there are characters that one likes best. I was smitten with Arya and Tyrion, and these characters propelled me through George RR Martin's Songs of Fire and Ice books, like Game of Thrones. But the character I liked the least -- Sansa -- and had to drag myself through her chapters, eventually, she became one of my favourite characters.
So, I am not irked that Ashkenazi doesn't like Kiva, but I am irked by WHY he does not like her. He seems to argue that authors have a responsibility to make characters likeable in a particular definition of "likeable" created by Ashkenazi. If this was just his opinion, okay, who cares. But he's writing all his content as ADVICE FOR WRITERS from some perceived place of authority -- I haven't bothered to review his credentials and learn if he has any actually authority to trot out these views -- as if Scalzi is not a very good writer. Again, opinion. Again, personal taste. Again, I know that some people really hate Scalzi, though the why of it baffles me.
For instance, Ashkenazi takes great umbrage that Kiva tortures someone for information and that suggests authors have to do better not because torturing for information is an overused trope -- despite the fact that it often works, which is why people do it -- or that the action goes against Kiva's character as defined -- and from what we learn of Kiva in her first chapter we so know that this is not outside her wheelhouse -- but rather because torture is wrong and authors should not promote it. WHAT??? He even links a previous article he wrote on authors doing better.
Wow. I do not want to read the books that would be produced in Ashkenazi's world. I want my characters messy. I want them to make mistakes or do things I would not condone in my own life, though I often see the sense of it in theirs. Authors do not have any obligation to uphold any kind of morality in the stories they create, especially those set on other worlds that they create. The mere suggestion that they have such a responsibility is absurd and really sad. It tells me all I need to understand about Ashkenazi's site. I am not and will not be a fan. I have included the text of the site here simply because he has a detailed summary of The Collapsing Empire and that's what I wanted to review to refresh my memory. Also, now, I keep it, so I can criticize it.
For the record, I love Kiva. She's a great character.
I also love the writing of John Scalzi. I enjoy his books immensely. Other writers whose work I adore, such as Warren Ellis and Wil Wheaton, also adore Scalzi and devour his books avidly. The reviews also show that Scalzi's books are very well received. So Ashkenazi is clearly in the minority, and like most of the Scalzi haters I have found, he's clearly jealous of Scalzi and insecure about his own work. He would surely deny it, but I think the subtext is glaringly obvious.
And so reviews and summaries. Just one from The Consuming Fire because I am re-reading that one and don't need to refresh so much. And soon, on to the brand new one, which I have had for almost a month, but first had to finish Mistborn, which was "meh."
https://daniellemaurer.com/blog/2018/6/14/book-review-the-collapsing-empire
MEMORABLE QUOTE:
The committee sat, senior-most closest to the emperox’s chair at the head of the table, with the exception of Archbishop Korbijn, who sat opposite of Cardenia. Cardenia noted the dress of each—the church bishops in fine red robes lined in purple, the guild representatives in their formal black and gold, the parliamentarians in somber blue business suits. Her own Very Serious Uniform was imperial green, dark with emerald piping.
We look like a box of crayons, Cardenia thought.
The Collapsing Empire - WIKI
The Collapsing Empire is a space opera novel by American writer John Scalzi. The book was published by Tor Books on March 21, 2017.[1] It is the first of a series that was originally intended to be two books but is planned to be a trilogy; the second book, The Consuming Fire, was released October 16, 2018.[2] The final book, The Last Emperox, was released on April 14, 2020.[3]
Plot[edit]
The Interdependency is a thousand-year-old human empire of 48 star systems connected by the Flow, a network of "streams" allowing faster-than-light travel. Each stream is one way and has an entry point and an exit point. There is no faster-than-light communication faster than the Flow, and interstellar trips are not instantaneous—ships carrying mail or passengers from Hub, the capital of the empire and the system with the most Flow connections, arrive at End, the most distant, nine months later—but the network permits life-sustaining intersystem trade. As a natural phenomenon, the Flow is poorly understood; Earth disconnected from the network thousands of years ago, and civilization on another system collapsed more recently when its pathway suddenly closed.
Family-owned megacorporations control all interstellar trade in the Interdependency's mercantile economy; one, House Wu, is the royal family. The trading houses are incredibly wealthy from government-sanctioned monopolies and by collecting tolls at "shoals", entrances and exits to Flow pathways. The state religion, with the Emperox as titular head, celebrates the Interdependency as a divinely sanctioned society.
Count Claremont, a physicist on End, calculates after decades of study that the Flow will soon collapse. All systems will be isolated; none are self-sufficient. Humans can only live on a planetary surface on End; they need space stations or underground habitats in other systems. Without the Flow, society on every system will likely collapse. The count sends his son Marce, also a physicist, to Hub to warn his old friend Emperox Attavio VI. The Emperox has died, however, and his unprepared daughter Cardenia is crowned as Grayland II.
House Nohamapetan wants to marry an heir to Cardenia to gain power. It believes that the Flow will change but not collapse, with End becoming the new center of the network. The house covertly supports rebels on End to overthrow its duke, hoping to take power and become the new royal family when the Flow network reshapes. Thousands of imperial troops are sent to End after terrorist bombings on Hub, allegedly caused by End conspirators but actually by the house.
Marce's ship is the last to leave End before its Flow entrance shoal closes; the system's exit shoal will be the last to close. Although Nohamapetan's plan to assassinate Cardenia is exposed, its family member on End frames Count Claremont for murdering the Duke of End and becomes the new Duke. The novel ends with Marce and Cardenia believing that they need to warn every system of the collapse and the need to evacuate people to End. Other nobles and bureaucrats are skeptical of their civilization's coming collapse, and Nohamapetan controls the Flow exit and imperial troops at End.
Reception[edit]
The Ars Technica reviewer enjoyed Scalzi's space opera and summarized the story as a "thought experiment about the fall of civilization."[4][5]
The TV rights to The Collapsing Empire have been purchased.[6]
The Collapsing Empire won the 2018 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel[7] and was a finalist for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novel.[8]
References[edit]
- ^ Scalzi, John. "Cover for The Collapsing Empire, My New Book, Out on March 21, 2017". Retrieved 6 April 2017.
- ^ "Attention: Book Name Change for The Widening Gyre". Retrieved 1 February 2018.
- ^ "The Last Emperox". Retrieved 25 May 2019.
- ^ Review of The Collapsing Empire at Ars Technica Retrieved April 6, 2017.
- ^ How John Scalzi Wrote ‘The Collapsing Empire’ Retrieved June 20, 2017.
- ^ Collapsing Empire TV rights Retrieved April 6, 2017.
- ^ "2018 Locus Awards Winners". Locus. 23 June 2018.
- ^ Standlee, Kevin (31 March 2018). "2018/1943 Hugo Award Finalists Announced".
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-speed-limit-john-scalzis-the-collapsing-empire/
No, Speed Limit: John Scalzi’s “The Collapsing Empire”
SEPTEMBER 23, 2017
ACCORDING TO Donald A. Wollheim, Golden Age science fiction typically imagined the future would unfold according to a certain pattern:
- humans explore and colonize the solar system;
- humans explore and colonize extrasolar planets;
- a Galactic Federation/Republic/Empire emerges;
- the Empire enjoys a peak period characterized by a stable metropole in the galactic center (however constituted) and ongoing exploration at “the Rim”;
- this peak period is followed by decadence and collapse;
- the collapse is followed by a Dark Age (of whatever length);
- a second Empire is established that is imagined to be perfected and permanent;
- and, finally, the people of the future undertake The Challenge to God: sometimes this literally culminates in overthrowing some sort of malevolent God Thing, while at other times it involves innovating some way to survive the heat death of the universe (or evolving into energy beings of pure light, et cetera).
From Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov to Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas (and on and on), one discovers this basic narrative recurring over and over again in science fictional narratives about the human “destiny” to inherit the stars. And of course it’s a story, in various ways, we still tell: just think of how every failing US presidency eventually tries to prop itself up by promising manned missions to Mars.
Despite its prevalence in NASA’s branding and self-promotion, however, manned space flight is no longer a priority for the organization; missions to the Moon stalled after only a few years, and the anticipated follow-up missions to Mars, the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter and beyond have remained only dreams. Current plans for Mars manned missions, only fragmentary, typically involve one-way suicide trips — hardly the stuff of our intergalactic dreams — and such trips very rarely satisfy anything like a rational cost-benefit analysis in terms of what we on Earth might get out of such projects. Our interstellar probes? They’re 3.5 centimeters wide. We’re stalling out at Wollheim’s first stage, long before we make the jump to lightspeed. Even the most unrestrained accelerationist futurism seems unable to sustain a vision of faster-than-light travel of the sort that would make a truly galactic civilization possible; our futures today seem earthbound, inside the computer, rather than “Out There” beyond the stars. And so, without some hyperspace corridor to lubricate our prophesied escape from Earth, space operatic science fiction discovers itself condemned, quite unhappily, as a future that failed.
But the wide-ranging influence of those cosmic stories, which once seemed so inevitable, means we experience our actual earthbound future as an incomprehensible betrayal. For humanity to flicker and die on Earth alone — and to leave no trace of itself save its garbage and the geological echo of incomprehensibly vast mass extinction — seems to us like a crime against the specialness of our species (not to mention all the other species we’ve made extinct just to get this far). Perhaps it says something about my personal psychology that I think so often of Margaret Atwood’s flash fiction “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet,” which addresses itself to “[y]ou who have come here from some distant world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the last day of all our recorded days I place our final words.” These unknown and unknowable aliens exert a brutal judgment upon our civilization, discovering in some deep future time an Earth that has been absolutely ruined by human activity. These aliens have achieved the dream of science fiction that the 20th century placed so much imaginative investment in: they have traveled from their home world to others and accessed the full wonders of the cosmos. But humans didn’t; we blew it. We died. Those final words, inscribed on the capsule, are a bitterly passive-aggressive rebuke to a civilization that had fantasized about eternal progress but was able to produce only death: “Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could fly.”
¤
John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire — whose title alone seems like an appallingly on-the-nose allegory for the state of the United States at this moment — is one of the most important revisionist hyperspace narratives to come along in some time. Scalzi, a master of science fictional parody and pastiche, has played with this problem before, unsettling the easy assumptions about hyperspace that characterized Golden Age science fiction. In Old Man’s War, his riff on Heinlein, hyperspace is indeed easy but carries with it a weird psychological cost: ships don’t actually move faster than light, they simply leap out of their original universe into a parallel one (which, the scientists assure everyone, is probably completely identical, more or less). In his Redshirts, a revisionist Star Trek, ships move at the speed of Narrative rather than according to any rational principle of physics; in his somber and understated The God Engines, the violation of physical principles we call hyperspace is made possible by flogging and torturing gods that our heroes have captured and enslaved.
Now, in The Collapsing Empire — another pastiche which combines elements of Asimov’s Foundation series with Banks’s Culture series, Herbert’s Dune, and Lucas’s Star Wars in ways that I found quite delightful as a life-long fan of the genre — Scalzi depicts stage five of that old eight-point Golden Age future: the collapse. The version of hyperspace we encounter here (called the Flow) is not simply “Ludicrous Speed” but a sort of bizarre physico-ontological formation lurking beneath three-dimensional space; the humans plying his millennia-old outer-space empire, called the Interdependency, have to access and exit the Flow using known access points not unlike wormholes. The result is a spiral of nodes not unlike a contemporary subway map, with a snarl of interconnecting nodes linking a central planet (Hub) to nearly all the others. Hub is naturally the seat of the empire, the Trantor- or Coruscant-like world city; we only spend time at one other location, End, the furthest inhabited solar system out on the Rim, which is connected only to Hub by a single long Flow shoal (so it’s Tatooine, Terminus, Arkanis, et cetera).
The Interdependency has been expressly socially engineered so that no one world in the network can survive independently without the others. On the surface, this represents an effort to promote peace; all worlds must trade resources in order to survive. Actually, of course, such interdependency ensures that the elites who control access to the Flow remain the masters of galactic society for all time. “Worlds,” in the traditional sense, hardly exist any longer: Hub, like most of the 47 other megastructures that humans now live upon, is actually an immense artificial habitat orbiting a gas giant; those that aren’t space habitats are often underground structures not nearly ecologically self-sufficient without constant import of new resources. The backwater, End, is the one and only habitable planet humans have found since their departure from Earth.
Access to Earth itself was lost over a 1,000 years ago, when the Flow shifted past Earth’s position in the cosmos and its entrance and exit points disappeared. Several hundred years ago, before the Flow was fully mapped, another planet, Dalasýsla, was lost due to Flow movement, but since then the Flow has been stable. Until, of course, our story begins, and the Flow begins to collapse altogether. Once this process reaches its completion, there will be no more trade among worlds; the doomed inhabitants of all the artificial megastructures of the Interdependency will fall into madness, despair, barbarism, and finally murderous rage as they lose all hope, a process already documented by the long-range telescopes that were pointed at Dalasýsla. Billions will die — and afterward the people of the Interdependency will survive (if they survive anywhere in the universe at all) only on End.
Thus the book violates our contemporary scientific understanding of the nonexistence of hyperspace only to immediately re-violate that violation and inaugurate an ongoing series of novels centered upon the struggle of humanity to survive, as we must, on a single world. This deformation of the concept of hyperspace is quite appropriate to the moment of the Anthropocene, both in thematic terms that I probably don’t need to belabor, and also in terms of its structuring allegory: an energistic-ecological nexus that capitalism has used to expand its power without first understanding (and in the process become utterly dependent on for its continued survival) has now reached its terminal breaking point. The Flow, like fossil fuels, represents a cruel optimism: the necrofuturological disaster it once seemed to stave off is in fact precisely the catastrophe it intensifies. And there in that galactic Interdependency, like here in our own earthbound one, an entrenched and denialist elite doesn’t want to hear about the problem, even as the evidence piles up and becomes undeniable, even as the crisis, and the need to act, begins to scream at them, and mass death and even human extinction becomes a near-term concern …
Denial is the only response — unless the elite see a way to make money off the catastrophe. The conflict the book sets up for its sequels is, unexpectedly, not so much the one between the denialists and the realists (as the loose climate change allegory might initially suggest), but rather between the radical environmentalists and the merely liberal ones — between the radicals, who recognize the full scope of the disaster and the need for wholesale transformation of our political and economic institutions in response, and the liberals who think we can just tweak things here and there, add in a carbon-trading market and (if you’re feeling really silly) a few new fossil fuel taxes, and go on more or less as we always have. The denialists are doomed from the jump, because they can’t adapt to a problem they refuse to recognize in the first place; Scalzi actually makes the liberal environmentalists the real enemy, because they recognize the problem but, too in love with their wealth and their privileges, misread it, slow walking and misplaying their response to the crisis — and in the process endanger the future of the entire human race.
¤
The title for this review comes from the title of Steven Shaviro’s excellent short book on accelerationism, No Speed Limit (2015), in which he characterizes accelerationism as a return to the more Promethean version of Marxism (as opposed to the backward-looking, nostalgic, or even pastoral varieties that have a bit more purchase today) in which “the only way out is through.” Capitalism (especially in its turbocharged, neoliberal, neo-feudal, and necrofuturological perfected contemporary form) has so transformed the coordinates of history that there is no going backward to some earlier form of production and distribution; instead, the accelerationists would tell us, the only option is to take hold of that grim engine of death and repurpose it in the service of what I at least would still optimistically call utopia.
Despite appearances, my insertion of the comma into Shaviro’s title does not denote an attack on him or even on accelerationism per se. Rather, the title came to me first as a dumb joke that I found I simply could not shake; eventually I became convinced — in that terrible power jokes sometimes have over us — that the joke actually held within it an important truth. That feeling of the future saying “no” is, I am convinced, central to the depressed mood that characterizes the Anthropocene. As in the Atwood story, the relentless nongaze of the Anthropocene, its maximum and brutally inhuman objectivity, is nonetheless still always experienced by us as a moral judgment on our civilization — and likewise in Scalzi’s novel we find characters who can’t help but feel like the purely automatic movement of the Flow is nonetheless “the universe commenting on” the social organization of the Interdependency and its (many) flaws. In The Collapsing Empire, as in our own rapidly collapsing American empire, the problem isn’t really ever-expanding speed, ever-growing imperial reach, or ever-more-fragile political consensus. It’s ecology: the natural world around us that we have always treated as a nonspace, a resource faucet and a pollution sink to be used and abused however we liked, finally talking back to us, telling us “no.” But if we can’t go back, and we can’t go forward — if the future just says “no” — what’s left? That’s the problem remaining to be solved in the coming sequel(s) to The Collapsing Empire — beginning with The Last Emperox, expected in 2019. As warships gather to battle over the grim dregs of a mostly doomed humanity — too late to solve anything, but with plenty of time to wreck what little hope is left — what sort of optimism or positivity might yet emerge? As Wollheim knew, these stories are always supposed to have a second act, a second chance after the Dark Age — the one thing, maybe, even more unbelievable than hyperspace.
¤
https://mythcreants.com/blog/lessons-from-the-fractured-plotting-of-the-collapsing-empire/
Lessons From the Fractured Plotting of The Collapsing Empire
The Lessons From Bad Writing series has long been one of our most popular segments here at Mythcreants, and for good reason. Authors learn a lot from seeing a popular book’s early chapters broken down and analyzed, and spec fic fans enjoy our snarky comments. But the Bad Writing posts have their limits. Specifically, they’re limited to only the first chapter or two, because quoting a whole novel would be ridiculous.
This time we’re trying something different: analyzing a novel’s entire plot. Instead of direct quotes from the text, we’ll summarize what happens in each chapter and then analyze how it affects the plot. We’ll look almost entirely at big-picture plot issues, not wordcraft or dialogue problems. Our book for today is the Hugo-nominated The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi. It’s a space opera epic about environmental collapse and economic organization, but how good is the plot? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Notice: The Collapsing Empire
Beware the Post-Prologue Reboot
In the prologue, a space captain is dealing with a mutiny while her ship is still in the Flow, this universe’s version of hyperspace. Just before the mutineers put a bullet in her brain, the ship is unexpectedly thrown out of the Flow. This is a problem because it leaves them stranded in empty space with no hope of rescue. Everyone is forced to work together to get the ship back into the Flow, and that’s when the captain turns the tables on the mutineers. She takes their leader by surprise, kills him, and the prologue ends.
Scalzi has a history of strong openings, and this one does not disappoint. It has fun action and compelling stakes: if the captain doesn’t defeat the mutineers, they’ll kill her! We’re on the captain’s side from the first paragraph, even when she banters with her charismatic enemy. We’re ready to hate her opponent because he wants to kill the captain and her loyal crew in the name of higher profits.
The prologue also effectively piques reader interest in the Flow. It’s a cool take on hyperspace, a set of currents to navigate rather than a uniform dimension that will take you wherever you want to go. Not only that, it also seems like the Flow is directly linked to the plot because something is happening to it. We don’t know what yet, but it spit the ship out when it wasn’t supposed to. That kind of cosmic change will get the reader’s attention every time, especially when mixed into a plot with personal stakes.
Unfortunately, as strong as the prologue is, it does have a problem: it’s a prologue. If the captain were a major character, Scalzi would probably have just labeled this chapter one, so I’m betting we never see her again. That’s too bad, because she’s very engaging, and now we have to go through the process again with a new main character. That’s the catch-22 of prologue characters: if the characters are likable, the reader will expect to see them again. If the characters aren’t likable, then the prologue is a slog to get through.
Open With Compelling Conflict
Moving on to chapter one, we meet our new POV character: Cardenia. Her father is dying, which is bad enough, but her father is also emperox* of the Interdependency, a massive trade-based empire. When he dies, Cardenia will be emperox, but she’s not prepared. Her half-brother was supposed to take the throne, but he died in an accident, so she’s the only one left. She was raised far away from the capital and doesn’t know the first thing about imperial politics. But she’s prepared to take the throne anyway. If she doesn’t, there will be a power struggle, and that’s bad for everyone. At least Cardenia still has her childhood friend Naffa to help organize things.
Once we get over the disappointment of leaving the prologue protagonist behind, this chapter is an excellent start to the story. Cardenia has everything a good protagonist needs. First, she’s sympathetic because she puts the needs of others ahead of herself. She’d much rather go home and never deal with politics again, but if she does that, the people of the Interdependency will suffer, so she stays. Responsibility is one of the most reliable ways I know to generate character likability, and what greater responsibility is there than leading all of humanity?
Second, Cardenia faces an excellent conflict. She doesn’t know how to rule, and we know from the dialogue that she’ll face enemies on every side. We don’t know what those enemies will want yet, but that’s okay since this chapter only needs to establish that they exist, and we can infer from the prologue that it will have something to do with the Flow streams. Finally, Cardenia is just a well-written character, wordcraft-wise. She’s grieving for her father, but at the same time, she barely knows him, and that contradiction comes across in her dialogue. She’s also witty, and her jokes about politics show that she’s clever despite being inexperienced. The perfect recipe for a likable protagonist.
This first chapter also does a great job showing how diverse the setting is. We’ve got an imperial line that doesn’t care about gender, as indicated by the title “emperox,” but there’s so much more. From the discussion of Cardenia’s marriage prospects, it’s clear that’s a gender-neutral affair as well. It doesn’t matter who she marries as long as it secures an alliance between space fiefdoms, which is what I call traditional values. From all the names being mentioned, it’s clear this is a setting where human racial groups are heavily mixed, and Cardenia herself is of Asian descent.
So we end chapter one with a great protagonist, the beginnings of a compelling conflict, and an inclusive world. Well done, Scalzi. The only red flag at this point is that it sounds like the emperox is an absolute monarch, which could make it hard to give Cardenia challenging obstacles once she’s crowned. No one can defy her if her word is law. That’s a solvable problem, though, especially if this is a setting where the monarch rules in name but someone else has the real power. We’ll see, but I’m excited to read what Cardenia does next!
Don’t Leave Readers Hanging
In chapter two, we switch to a different character: Kiva Lagos, the wealthy scion of a merchant house. She’s captaining one of her family’s freighters* to a planet called End. She’s having sex with a subordinate when someone interrupts to say that they’re not being allowed to sell their cargo. She yells at local officials until they let slip that this is all being done at the behest of Kiva’s political rival, Ghreni Nohamapetan. The chapter ends with Kiva in search of a new way to make money off this trip.
Remember how I said I was excited to see what Cardenia did next? Well, instead we get a chapter about this new character, Kiva. What does she have to do with Cardenia? I honestly have no idea. They’re part of the same universe, but that’s about it. I suspect their plotlines will meet up eventually, but right now it feels like I’ve started a different story altogether. This was annoying enough when it happened after the prologue, but at least I was ready for it. I was not expecting another story reboot so soon.
To make matters worse, the conflict presented in this chapter is far less interesting than what we had last time. Cardenia’s conflict concerned every human in the Interdependency. Kiva’s conflict concerns a shipment of fruit. If Cardenia fails, it could mean death and suffering for billions. If Kiva fails, it means her family will take a moderate loss to their obscene fortune. That’s just not as compelling. It’s certainly possible to make a story about fruit shipments compelling, but it’s harder when you’ve already introduced a much larger conflict, and it’s harder still when there’s nothing serious at stake.
Kiva is also less likable than Cardenia. A lot less likable. She swears a lot and gets angry when she doesn’t immediately get what she wants, which makes her seem rather immature. She doesn’t think about others at all. The final nail in her likability coffin is her predatory attitude toward sex. She doesn’t care what her partner wants, and she even orders him to stay when he strongly hints that he’d like leave after they’re interrupted. This would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but she’s also his boss. Disobeying her could have serious consequences for him, which makes the whole thing even more coercive. Gross.
It’s common for stories with multiple points of view to fracture into several threads that are only quasi-related, and that seems to be what’s happening here. In a merciful universe, Kiva would be a minor character thrown in for a bit of exposition, but all the focus on her inner thoughts makes me think she’s a secondary protagonist. Fantastic. Hopefully we’ll at least learn how she relates to Cardenia soon.
Continue the Plot
In chapter three, we’re back with Cardenia. Her father is dead, and she takes a few minutes to process that with her friend Naffa. Then she goes about the business of becoming emperox. She meets with the Executive Committee and learns about the most pressing matters of state, including a rebellion on the planet End, her dead brother’s betrothal agreement with the Nohamapetan family, and that her father was in frequent contact with a Flow physicist named Claremont.Then Cardenia visits a place called the Memory Room: a chamber where all the previous emperoxes have stored their memories and personalities. She talks to her father’s imprint, and we get some foreshadowing about a major problem on the horizon. The chapter ends with Cardenia asking for more information.
Thank heavens we’re back with Cardenia. Things pick up smoothly where they left off, even with the interruption of Kiva’s subplot. Cardenia is still her likable self, trying to come to grips with her situation now that her father is gone. Also, she doesn’t coerce anyone into sex, which is an admittedly low bar but after last time we can’t be sure. The conflict is still simmering, but that’s okay! The tension is high because even though nothing has blown up yet, we still know what’s at stake.
This chapter also gives us at least a hint that Cardenia’s story is connected with Kiva’s. The planet End is mentioned, and we also hear about the Nohamapetan family, which Kiva is currently dealing with. I suspect they’re gonna be our main antagonists. These small connections aren’t enough, but they’re better than nothing.
The Memory Room is a great bit of worldbuilding. It’s a wondrous device, the first thing that feels truly futuristic in a setting that otherwise seems like a modern world set in space. It also makes for some great dialogue, as the former emperoxes’ imprints tell Cardenia exactly what they think of her: namely that she’s in over her head and too nice for the job. Not only does this reinforce the conflict, it makes me cheer for Cardenia even harder. I want her to prove those musty old fogeys wrong!
We don’t yet know what this big problem is, but I’ll bet money it’s about the Flow streams that connect the Interdependency. That’s an even more pressing conflict than I first imagined.
Secondary Plotlines Need to Matter
In chapter four, we meet Marce Claremont, son of Claremont the physicist, whom Cardenia learned about previously. Marce is teaching some kids about the Flow, but he dismisses class early on account of being in a war zone. Specifically, the war zone on End. He and his sister Vrenna return to their home and chat with their father about his research on the imminent collapse of the Flow streams. They are interrupted by Ghreni Nohamapetan, who tries to entangle them in his political maneuvering. Specifically, he wants the elder Claremont to help him get a bunch of money that he double promises will be used to end the rebellion. Ghreni is quickly shown the door. The elder Claremont decides that Marce must go to the capital and explain the Flow collapse research to the emperox.In chapter five, Kiva decides she can make extra money by charging exorbitant prices to people fleeing the violence on End. Ghreni shows up, and they verbally spar for a bit. Then Ghreni offers to pay her if she hands over any information on Marce, and Kiva agrees.
First of all, wow, the Flow streams are collapsing. That’s big. I suspected that’s what was happening, but now we have it confirmed. We also have our third point-of-view character, and at this point, I just hope there aren’t any more. At first, it seems like Marce is clearly relevant to Cardenia’s story, because he knows about the Flow streams and is going to tell her about it. This is huge: the Interdependency is basically a series of extremely specialized trade routes. The end of faster-than-light travel would be disastrous since no colony is set up to be self-sufficient.
But then I looked back at the previous chapter and realized this must be what Cardenia was about to learn in the Memory Room, because it was specified that Claremont had sent along all his data. So Cardenia already knows what’s happening, and Marce traveling to meet her won’t change that. Claremont says that the emperox will need someone to walk her through the data, but it’s really unclear what that means. Did he not write abstracts with his previous reports?
So we’re still left with an extremely tenuous link between Cardenia and the other two characters. I’m hoping it’ll grow stronger, but I don’t have high expectations. At least Ghreni is solidifying his place as an antagonist, though at the moment we don’t know what he’s after. He also doesn’t come across as particularly threatening or competent, but there’s still time for him to grow.
Oh, and Kiva decides to squeeze people fleeing a war zone. Nice. I wonder what she’ll think of next to make me dislike her? At least Marce has a sympathetic motivation, even if his story doesn’t feel important. Kiva’s chapters are actively unpleasant.
Stories Should Focus on the Interesting Conflict
In chapter six, Cardenia finds out the full scoop about the Flow streams collapsing. She learns that this happened on a much smaller scale centuries ago, cutting off a major colony from the rest of the Interdependency. The colony quickly collapsed, unable to sustain itself without trade.Then there’s an assassination attempt! Cardenia survives, barely, but her best friend, Naffa, is killed in the explosion. Cardenia doesn’t know who ordered the attempt, but she’s determined to find out.
Cardenia’s chapters keep getting better and better. This one has both personal and grand political drama. The personal drama is obvious: Cardenia’s best friend dies! This hits Cardenia hard, and readers are primed to grieve along with her. It also gives her an emotional stake in the conflict. She’s not only trying to save civilization, but she also wants to get justice for her friend.
The grand politics are really interesting too – at least to an economics nerd like me. It seems humanity is facing a problem of overspecialization, much like what happened to Britain in WWII. Prior to the war, Britain imported most of its food from abroad. Though it was possible to grow all the nation’s food at home, it was far more efficient to buy it from Canada through international trade. But you know what messes with international trade? German U-boats. Suddenly, Britain had to retool its entire economy for domestic food production before the population starved.
The Flow collapse will cause a similar crisis, except worse and on a grander scale. That won’t be easy to fix, especially since Cardenia has a limited window of time before she loses the ability to command her empire at all. The problem is further complicated by the prospect of denialism. When the Flow streams shifted before, entrenched interests quashed any research into the problem in the name of protecting the status quo, and that will almost certainly happen again. Anyone who’s listened to climate deniers can empathize with Cardenia’s situation.
At this point, I wonder what it would be like to simply read Cardenia’s chapters in total isolation from the other characters. So far I can’t see what we’d be missing. Ah well, let’s take a break from the woman carrying the weight of humanity on her shoulders so we can check in on an unnecessary scientist and a jerk-ass freighter captain.
Villains Shouldn’t Be Humiliated
In chapter seven, Marce tries to get passage on Kiva’s ship, but Ghreni’s goons capture him instead. Ghreni is hoping he can ransom Marce – though it’s still not clear exactly what he needs the money for, just that it’s somehow related to the rebellion on End. Vrenna quickly shows up, rescues Marce, and sneaks him aboard Kiva’s ship.In chapter eight, Kiva reveals that she told Ghreni where to find Marce and then told Vrenna where to rescue him. This way, Kiva got paid twice. She lays into Ghreni for a while over a video call, telling him exactly how incompetent he is. Ghreni tries to sway her by hinting that he knows about the Flow streams collapsing, but she’s not interested.
I was wondering what Kiva would do to further her detestability, and playing both sides of a hostage situation certainly qualifies. At this point, I’m really wondering what her role in the story is supposed to be. She certainly gets more jokes than any other character, so maybe she’s supposed to be the scoundrel with the heart of gold? That would probably work better if she were a little more mature and not a sexual predator.
Marce remains a passive character, but it’s really Ghreni who suffers. He’s the closest thing we have to an antagonist, and he can’t seem to do anything right. No one takes him seriously, his bribery attempts are laughable, and his goons are easily dispatched. It does seem like he has a deeper plan going on than we previously thought, if he knows about the Flow collapse, but that doesn’t matter when he’s so incompetent.
Antagonists provide opposition to the heroes, and Ghreni’s opposition is feeble indeed. That means there’s no tension when the heroes oppose him. If this were his exit from the story, that wouldn’t be so terrible, but I have a feeling he’ll stick around.
Reveals Should Change the Story
In chapter nine, Cardenia tries to find out more about the bomb that killed Naffa. Amit Nohamapetan, Ghreni’s older brother, tells her it was likely the work of the rebels on End, but Cardenia is suspicious of him. Cardenia takes a moment to grieve for her friend, comforted by her father’s old advisor.She then heads to the Memory Room where she learns a startling secret. While the trade-based Interdependency is advertised as being beneficial, even necessary, for humanity’s survival, that message is a scam. In the distant past, humanity’s extreme reliance on trade was engineered by a powerful conspiracy to enrich a select few families who control access to the Flow streams.
Wow, that was a big reveal, right? The entire Interdependence is built on a lie. That changes everything! Except it doesn’t, because this reveal has no impact on the story. First, it isn’t necessary to explain anything. It’s perfectly plausible that the Interdependency could have formed on its own, so we didn’t need the backstory for justification. Heck, Earth is headed in that direction right now, with national economies increasingly specializing, and that’s just a result of market forces.*
Second, this reveal doesn’t change what Cardenia needs to do. The Interdependency is already going to end when the Flow streams break down. So even if Cardenia were fired up with anti-Interdependency sentiment, which she doesn’t seem to be, she’d still just keep doing what she’s already doing.
The best-case scenario I can imagine for this reveal is if it had come when Cardenia was in deep despair. Perhaps she’d looked at all the economic data available and concluded that humanity simply cannot survive without galactic trade, and everyone will perish when the Flow streams close. Then she finds this secret buried deep in the Memory Room. Humans once existed without the Interdependency, in a time where every world was self-sufficient. They did it before, and they can do it again.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. Instead, this chapter feels like Cardenia’s story has been put on hold while we wait for Kiva and Marce to resolve their part of the book. That’s frustrating because up until now Cardenia’s plotline was easily the best part of the story.
Pirates Are No Substitute for a Plot
Chapters 10–12 happen in quick succession. Marce is smuggled onto Kiva’s ship. He hears some rumors further hinting that the Nohamapetans know about the flow collapse, but it’s not clear yet how that figures into their plans.As Kiva’s ship leaves the system, another ship starts following them. They figure out pretty quickly that it’s pirates and that the pirates have a spy on the ship. With Marce’s help, they capture the spy, and Kiva tortures him until he reveals that this is another of Ghreni’s schemes. The pirates are supposed to capture Marce or kill him if they can’t.Kiva’s people make the spy look like Marce, and then they trick the pirates into taking the spy and a small bomb on board their ship. The pirate ship is heavily damaged, and Kiva’s ship escapes.
In a vacuum, this section is quite exciting. The characters are being chased by pirates and there’s a spy on their ship, what fun! Marce even gets to do something when he helps take down the spy, which is nice for a character who’s been so passive until now. However, this scene does not happen in a vacuum, and as such it has some major problems.
Most immediately, this pirate attack is Ghreni’s plan, which automatically makes it less interesting. We’ve seen how effective his plans are, so there’s never a worry that the pirates might actually win. This is why it’s important not to humiliate your villain early in the story; it comes back to bite you later. At this point, even revealing that the Nohamapetans are actually behind the Flow collapse won’t be enough to save them.
At a more structural level, these chapters serve no meaningful purpose. Despite the brief summary, the pirate attack takes up a lot of page space, what with all the planning and witty repartee. That’s a huge section of the book spent in service of getting Marce to the capital so he can tell Cardenia something she already knows. And Cardenia’s story is basically paused until he gets there.
To round out this waste of time, Kiva tortures someone, because why not? I guess I should have expected that since she’s absolutely the worst. But what really irritates me is that the scene is written with no understanding of how torture actually works. Somehow, Kiva magically knows the spy is telling the truth when he says he doesn’t have any more information. How does she know that? Why doesn’t she just keep torturing him until he invents something to make her stop? That’s what would happen if this were real torture. When fiction portrays torture as a magical means of retrieving information instead of the pointless horror it actually is, it encourages people to support torture in real life. Authors have a responsibility to do better.
Villains Aren’t Built in a Day
Next, we have an “Interlude”* chapter from Ghreni’s point of view. We flashback to a planning session with Ghreni, his brother Amit, and his sister Nadashe. It’s revealed that the Nohamapetans know something is happening with the Flow streams, but they think the Flow is shifting rather than collapsing. In their model, End will soon be the new center of the Flow streams, so Nadashe hatches a plan. Ghreni will go to End and take it over while she schemes in the capital. Amit, who doesn’t like the plan, will stay out of the way because no one thinks he’s very smart.In the present, Ghreni complains to himself about how nothing is going his way. Then he gets chewed out by the Imperial marine commander for kidnapping Marce. Then Ghreni hatches and executes a plan where he murders the current Duke of End and frames Claremont for it. This seems to work, and Ghreni maneuvers to get himself declared the new duke, since the rebels have been in his pocket the whole time.But when Ghreni visits Claremont’s cell in order to gloat, Claremont reveals the truth: the flow streams aren’t shifting, they’re collapsing. Soon, End will be flooded with refugees because it’s the only world in the Interdependency that’s close to self-sufficient. The chapter ends with the implication that Ghreni and Claremont will work together to handle the new crisis.
Ghreni has plot-whiplash in this chapter. He starts out as the world’s saddest villain, actually complaining about how everyone is threatening him and listing all his previous failures. Then, he suddenly gets himself declared leader of End, which was everything he wanted. Then he realizes everything he did was for nothing, and he has to ask for Claremont’s help.
There are a few technical problems with Ghreni’s plan, mostly that it doesn’t seem like the Imperial commander would buy that Claremont murdered the old duke, and if the commander doesn’t go along with the plan, then it won’t work. But more importantly, Ghreni’s victory doesn’t feel earned. He’s failed over and over again, so it’s incredibly contrived that this last-minute plan would get the job done. If it were that easy, why didn’t he do it before?
A villain getting an unearned victory isn’t as bad as a hero getting an unearned victory, but it still hurts the story. It makes the heroes seem truly incompetent, since they couldn’t even best the bumbling bad guy. This chapter also destroys the last shred of hope for the Nohamapetan family as villains: that they knew something the heroes didn’t, and all their seemingly failed plans were actually part of a deeper scheme. Instead, we find out they’re just wrong about what’s happening with the Flow streams. That could have worked as the fatal flaw in an otherwise functional scheme; instead, it’s just more failure to heap at the Nohamapetans’ feet.
All that said, a hero and a villain needing to team up in the face of a greater problem is a cool idea. It could have worked great if Ghreni were a villain worth respecting and if this entire End plot didn’t feel like a distraction from the story that actually matters. Instead, it’s just another underwhelming plot development.
Villains Shouldn’t Crumble Under Pressure
Chapter 13 opens with Cardenia being briefed on more bombings in the capital. Nadashe Nohamapetan arrives and continues Amit’s work of trying to convince Cardenia that the End rebels are behind the bombings, and she advocates military intervention, though it’s not clear why she’s doing this. She also tries to convince Cardenia that marrying Amit would be a smart political move. She and Cardenia both make fun of Amit’s intelligence. Cardenia is suspicious of Nadashe but agrees to give Amit a chance. The chapter ends with Cardenia being told that Marce has arrived.Chapter 14 is back with Kiva. She and her mother team up to go extort money from the Nohamapetans in vengeance for Ghreni’s earlier shenanigans. They meet with Amit and browbeat him until he gives them all the money they want.
I have to say, despite how literally no one likes Amit, he’s actually one of the more sympathetic characters in the book. Earlier he tried to convince his siblings not to launch a zany plan that would risk the family’s entire fortune, and now he’s just trying to run a business when two of his rivals show up and blackmail him over stuff his siblings did. Give the man a break!
Unfortunately, Amit’s likability isn’t put to use. Instead, he just serves as another example of how unimpressive the Nohamapetans are as villains. Even at their corporate headquarters, the heart of their power, they have little choice but to roll over when threatened. Nadashe is the family’s last hope, and at least she hasn’t totally failed yet. Even so, she’s pretty lackluster. Cardenia is suspicious of her from the start, and because Cardenia’s word is law, it doesn’t seem like Nadashe can do much.
That’s the problem with making the hero an all-powerful monarch; it’s nearly impossible for the villains to threaten them. If Cardenia decided to eject Nadashe from the court, Nadashe would have no recourse. In order for this dynamic of a powerful hero and a weak villain to work, Cardenia has to trust Nadashe. That’s what happens in stories like Othello, where the hero could crush the villain at any moment but doesn’t because they don’t realize the villain is a threat. That’s not happening here, so it’s hard to imagine what Nadashe could possibly do to make her plan succeed – whatever that plan is.
At least we’re getting closer to Cardenia and Marce finally meeting, so Marce can tell her something she already knows. Maybe after that happens, Cardenia’s story will get to advance.
The Villain’s Master Stroke Must Be Formidable
We’re in the home stretch now. In chapter 15, Marce arrives in the capital, he and Cardenia hit it off, and both of them contemplate a galaxy without the Interdependency. He gives her some specific information on the Flow collapse, including that the stream from End to the capital is already gone, though travel back to End is still possible.In chapter 16, Cardenia goes on a formal date with Amit, but she’s already decided not to marry him. Instead, she thinks about how she might be into Marce. Then she realizes that something is bothering Amit and talks the entire Nohamapetan plot out of him. Their date ends when a shuttle crashes into their ship, killing Amit and wounding Cardenia.In chapter 17, the Nohamapetans try to frame Kiva’s family for the shuttle attack. The Imperial Guard place Kiva under surveillance, but it’s clear they don’t believe the charge. After a brief investigation, Kiva finds proof that is was in fact Nadashe Nohamapetan who ordered the attack, surprising no one.In chapter 18, Cardenia and Marce confront Nadashe in a committee meeting, and Nadashe pulls her master stroke: while Cardenia was recovering, Nadashe blamed the shuttle attack on End rebels and convinced parliament to send a troop transport to capture End. The ship’s officers are Nadashe’s people, and she claims they can destroy any ship sent after them. Nadashe still thinks the Flow is shifting rather than collapsing. She is arrested.In the epilogue, Cardenia orders the military to retake End and contemplates how difficult it will be to prepare humanity for the Flow’s collapse.
Well, now we know what all the buildup for Marce and Cardenia meeting was for: a potential romance in the next book! That’s not a super great reason to put the main plot on hold, but here we are. It’s not entirely clear why Cardenia likes Marce either. The book tries to portray him as the one person who will speak plainly with her while everyone else bows and scrapes because of her rank, but plenty of other characters have spoken plainly to Cardenia. Oh well, that’s something for the sequel to deal with.
The main point of this section is Nadashe Nohamapetan’s master stroke: another failed assassination attempt, a weak frame job of her rivals, and one troop transport sent to End. That’s her Hail Mary, and it totally flops. Cardenia is still alive, no one bought the frame job, and the Nohamapetans have one ship against the entire Imperial military. I don’t care how much the book talks about Flow stream bottlenecks – there’s no way one ship can hold the system. It’s not even a warship; it’s a troop transport! That’s like trying to hold a mountain pass by parking a Humvee in it. It’s not even clear if the ship’s crew is loyal to Nadashe beyond the officers.
But at least in exchange for this total failure, Nadashe killed her brother. Great job! The worst part of Nadashe’s plan is that the heroes didn’t need to do anything in order to thwart her. Her plan essentially defeated itself. Kiva did find proof of the Nohamapetan’s involvement, but it wasn’t necessary because Amit already confessed the whole plan to Cardenia, and Cardenia is the emperox. She can have Nadashe arrested on a whim. For that matter, Cardenia doesn’t even really need to control End, since it won’t be the new center of the Flow streams like Nadashe thought. It’s just a convenient place to send refugees on account of it being slightly more self-sufficient than other worlds.
And with that, the novel ends. The Flow streams plot has barely advanced at all since we spent most of the story on Marce’s trip to the capital. The only resolution is that the possible love birds have finally met, and that Kiva has even more money than she had before. The book dangled an exciting tale of environmental collapse in front of us, then snatched it away. But don’t worry, the epilogue promises that we’ll actually get to the Flow stream collapse next time. Maybe we will, but I’m not in a trusting mood.
What the Novel Needed
The Collapsing Empire’s main problem is that it tries to do too much and ends up doing very little. We start with the really high-level Cardenia plot, then awkwardly transition into the much lower-stakes plot of Kiva and Marce. This would have been awkward even if Marce’s journey were relevant to Cardenia’s story, and it isn’t. Cardenia is the one who actually matters, and her story is held back so she doesn’t do anything too important before Marce gets to her.
There are a couple ways this could be solved, and the most obvious is to cut Cardenia from the book entirely. That hurts to say; Cardenia is my favorite character, but she’s also completely disconnected from everything else. A natural build-up would have been to spend this book with just Marce and Kiva as they try to get Marce off End and to the Imperial capital. That would leave more room to develop Ghreni as a villain, and it would keep Cardenia’s higher-stakes plot from overshadowing the rest of the book.
In this scenario, Marce would expect his troubles to end once he reaches the capital because the emperox will fix everything; instead, he gets there and discovers Cardenia is newly crowned and completely unprepared for what’s coming. That would be the perfect lead-in to book two, where the issue of environmental collapse can be properly addressed.
This new structure wouldn’t fix every problem, of course. Ghreni would need to be a more competent villain, and Kiva would need to be made likable, but it would fix the fractured plotting that’s at the heart of the book’s troubles. Starting with the relatively small problem of Marce reaching the capital would naturally escalate to saving the Interdependency in the sequel. Of course, it would also work to cut Marce’s part of the novel and focus entirely on Cardenia, but that would be a harder act to follow in the next book.
If we’re absolutely stuck with the three POVs as they currently stand, then there should at least be something that connects them. Right now, they feel completely unrelated until the very end. I’m not sure what that connection would be, but at least Marce should bring something the emperox actually needs. Maybe someone’s been intercepting all communications between End and the capital, so Marce has no choice but to take the Flow data in person. That way when he and Cardenia finally meet, it means something.
Believe it or not, this is actually the second time Scalzi has created a grand political drama and then avoided it. He did the same thing in The Last Colony, where a minor character is busy putting an end to interstellar war while the main story focused on the hardships of setting up a colony without wi-fi. In that book and this one, Scalzi offered a Ferrari, then switched it for a beat-up Pinto. Readers have tolerated this bait and switch from Scalzi so far because he’s incredibly skilled in other areas, but that’s not a risk the rest of us can afford to take.
Need an editor? We’re at your service.
https://www.tor.com/2018/10/24/book-reviews-john-scalzi-the-consuming-fire/
Watch Out for Assassins: A Spoiler-Filled Review of John Scalzi’s The Consuming Fire
Renay Williams
Everyone’s had time to read The Consuming Fire, the second book in John Scalzi’s expansive new space adventure series, The Interdependency. If not, it’s time to rock up to your nearest bookstore, Audible app, or library and fix that. You won’t want to venture into this post without arming yourselves with the plot of the book (unless you love spoilers and then, that’s fine). If you want a taste of what you’re in for, check out the recap of The Collapsing Empire and the spoiler-free review of The Consuming Fire over here.
If you’re ready, let’s talk politics, plots, machinations, and banging. Spoilers, ahoy!
When we left our heroes, Emperox Grayland II of the Interdependency, or Cardenia, had survived several assassination plots by Nadashe Nohamapetan. Unfortunately for Nadashe’s brother Amit, he didn’t, leaving us down one antagonist and with the third, Ghreni, trapped on the planet End at the farthest edge of Interdependency space. Marce Claremont, our awkward rural scientist from End, has just dropped data on Cardenia that says the Flow shoals that the empire uses for travel, colonization, and trade will soon vanish. That will leave the empire fractured and many populations cut off and doomed without the ability to require additional resources. Kiva Lagos, a member of House Lagos, who brought Marce and his data through the Flow to be delivered to Cardenia, also brought with her dirt on more Nohamapetan shenanigans on End. Nadashe, having acquired incomplete data about the Flow shoals, launched a whole plan for mutiny that would leave her family in power instead of Cardenia’s. Too bad about the incomplete bits, and also too bad that Kiva Lagos is irked and has the information to really ruin their day.
Sequels can be hard to pull off, because you have to tie up some loose ends, drop new mysteries for the reader to chew on (making a note here—HUGE SUCCESS), juggle old and new characters alike, and keep the tension high—it’s not the last part of the story! Luckily, The Consuming Fire does so beautifully with some excellent character introductions, universe expansion, and some great villainy. There’s lots to unpack, but we’re going to focus on five specific things.
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Political Maneuvering 101
Cardenia, thrust into the position as emperox, is quickly tossed into what for us would amount to a global crisis. However, Cardenia is no fool, even if she wasn’t raised to take over a massive empire. The Interdependency was founded using visions—a really flimsy PR tactic that somehow worked—and so Cardenia tries to use them, too. She proclaims visions that support the data that Marce has provided about the collapse of the Flow shoals in order to shift public opinion. Sadly, the other parts of the government aren’t super thrilled. But given that they all seem intent on fighting over power, disregarding science, and being real jerks about it, Cardenia’s visions plan was at least a plan.
Murderers Gonna Murder
Nadashe went to prison for trying to assassinate the emperox and also killing her brother Amit in the process, but that’s not the end of the story. Her mother, Countess Nohamapetan, taught her how to scheme, but not quite how to pull convoluted schemes off and not get caught. So when Nadashe finds herself rescued from a prisoner transport and presumed dead by everyone, she’s largely off the board as her mother tries to plant doubt about her guilty within society. Countess Nohamapetan is prepared to marry Nadashe off and do quite a few terrible things to continue Nadashe’s plan, because after all, who cares that their entire society is on the brink of destruction? For those harboring any doubts that Countess Nohamapetan is the OG schemer in House Nohamapetan, who else gasped out loud when she admitted to killing Cardenia’s brother once it became clear he and Nadashe might not work out? But again, talk about being the victim of your own arrogance—Cardenia has made life for House Nohamapetan hell way more than her brother might have, deservedly so. See: Attempts, Assassination.
It’s brilliant to watch how Cardenia finally puts Countess Nohamapetan in her place. That is, charged, along with her minions, with treason. But we haven’t seen the last of the Nohamapetans. Nadashe makes a quick escape to avoid recapture. The Consuming Fire hasn’t forgotten the existence of Ghreni Nohamapetan, but he’s still on End with Marce’s father and sister. Well, we assume so, and it’s likely Nadashe will head to him.
Still, seems risky. Vrenna Claremont doesn’t seem like an awfully forgiving person when you mess with her family.
New Friends & New Data
Marce is making tons of new friends in The Consuming Fire. First, there’s Hatide Roynold, who Nadashe received Flow data from. Nadashe used Hatide’s data to hatch her mutiny/Interdependency takeover, not realizing that the data wasn’t complete. Hatide, unfortunately, didn’t have her work peer reviewed, because the only other person studying the data, Count Claremont—Marce’s father—was banned by Cardenia’s father from talking about his research. Hatide accosts Marce after a lecture and shows him that his data is incomplete without hers—hers just shows something different and when you combine them the full picture emerges. Instead of the Flow collapse, it’s going to be a collapse paired with the opening and closing of temporary Flow shoals in different places.
This leads Marce and Hatide to discover that there’s actually an older Flow shoal open again. It was lost years before; Marce is adamant that they go through the shoal to see what happened on the other end so they can make better preparations for the empire.
Although the trip reveals that people survived in space for centuries, it’s undermined by the same forces trying to take over the Interdependency. Countess Nohamapetan sends assassins (she loves herself a solid assassination) after Marce and his team, and Marce and a few others only survive because they accidentally find a sentient spaceship that rescues them, and Marce makes his second friend.
Yes, that’s right: a sentient spaceship.
Poor Hatide, who just wanted to do science, is murdered along with the crew of Marce’s original ship. I bet Marce is going to put her name first on whatever papers he publishes, guaranteed. The new ship, helmed by an AI called Chenevert, comes to their rescue but also reveals that hey, the Interdependency wasn’t the only government out there. Also, the Interdependency didn’t accidentally lose Earth—they left with extreme prejudice.
The Secret History
After helping the survivors at the end of the newly opened Flow shoal before it closes, Marce brings Chenevert back to the Interdependency and introduces him to Cardenia. This is the greatest because a) Chenevert is actually an awesome character who, if he gets developed further, has the chance to become an excellent ally and b) he gives Cardenia some info that helps her start using the power at her disposal. Cardenia’s Memory Room—housing the memories and experiences of all the emperoxes before her—also houses data collected and stored by the AI that runs the room. It’s scooped up data the entire time it’s been active, and has a record of the time before the Interdependency.
Cardenia is probably the best person to have access to the power that Chenevert inadvertently brings her by alerting her to the secrets of the Memory Room. Chenevert’s existence, his escape from his own empire through a shifting Flow shoal, and Cardenia’s discovery of even more history of the Interdependency raise many questions about the survival of her empire.
Love is in the Air
Yeah, this is a book containing Kiva Lagos, so I hope no one thought we were leaving this discussion without talking about banging. There’s some great banging, because Cardenia and Marce finally get their heads out of their butts. Cardenia: falling in love! Marce: resigned to being a fling because he’s not important enough to marry and oblivious to how deep Cardenia is getting. I endorse some angst, emotionally resonant resolution, and a happy ending for these two nerds. *stares directly at John Scalzi, who is definitely reading this*
The most interesting, though, is Kiva! Countess Nohamapetan has a lawyer, Senia Fundapellonan. And because Kiva is Kiva, of course she’s gonna bang the lawyer. I don’t even know why that’s a spoiler. “Kiva Lagos meets someone new and doesn’t try to bang them” doesn’t even compute. But who knew that Countess Nohamapetan would get so mad at Kiva for working to root out all the corruption in House Nohamapetan’s finances that she would engage in assass—no. No, of course she would go directly to assassination. Unfortunately for her, her assassin doesn’t hit Kiva. Instead, they hit Fundapellonan, and Kiva has to go punch some people for it. And wouldn’t you know—Fundapellonan starts to grow on her. We’ll see if Kiva Lagos is ready to settle down or not in the next book. That’d be the biggest twist of the whole series.
The End
I’ve only scratched the surface of the adventures in The Consuming Fire. There’s a lot going on here and I could talk about it all, but why not save some fun discussions for the comments or Twitter? Things I didn’t cover: the Wu family is full of squabbling whiners; yeah, those people lost when the Flow shoal closed did survive and the reason will surprise you; is part of this book grappling with how governments respond to massive change similar to, oh, you know, scary reports about our own global temperature? Also, is it okay to use certain power, even when it’s for a good reason?
These questions and more await you in The Consuming Fire. I hope you love it. I sure did.
Renay Williams stumbled into online fandom, fanfiction, and media criticism via Sailor Moon in 1994. Since then, she’s become an editor at Lady Business and a co-host of Fangirl Happy Hour. She can be found having emotions over the lives of fictional characters on Twitter @renay.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2005.08 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1770 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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