The Collapsing Empire

Firstly, to agree with other reviewers the dialogue is excellent, witty, fast-paced. It keeps the story moving and its a strong story. I'm definitely getting the rest of the collection.

But the denouements and twists are beautiful, from the outcome of the mutiny in the prologue to the importance of peer review (!) revealed at the end of part two. Best laid plans falling apart because of different information is great.

The memory room is a nice device, too. As Sherlock had his Watson, Batman his Robin, I can see this century will have AI agents as the counterpart where the protagonist explains important bits of the plot. This needs to be done with care, and is.

But the overall arch is the best. The Empire is collapsing, the Emperox knows and has trusted experts explain the details, the sailors on the starships can see the "Flow" collapsing (the plot device that allows interstellar travel), but saving humanity isn't happening because the oligarchs (guilds) don't want to know for the most part, and really don't care about saving humanity. There is a metaphor there somewhere ...

This is very much just one part of a three-part novel, which I find difficult to review in isolation. Because this site works best when people review the things they read, however, I will be adding the same review to all volumes.

John Scalzi is a nice guy writing nice SF novels.

You could almost leave it at that, really. For the sake of context, I will add a few more details to this assessment. This, like all of his novels I have read, is smoothly plotted and written, entirely unsurprising in its cliffhangers and ultimate resolution, and contains exactly one original idea. This being said, it’s an entertaining read if, at times, a bit too glib to my taste (I don’t think Scalzi has ever seen a witty repartee he didn’t like). If what you want from your SF is what I just described, you could do a lot worse than the Interdependency series.