This is a trilogy by John Scalzi, but the books are so short that I decided to review them all at once, so here goes:
The premise is that there’s something in space called the “Flow”, which is kind of like a jet stream, but in space and it goes both ways. People use the Flow to travel between planets much more quickly than they could possibly get there otherwise, but they have no control over the Flow and they don’t even really understand it. Nevertheless, they rely on it to get people and products between planets in the Interdependency, which is basically a giant empire in space consisting of lots of different planets and space systems.
With the Flow, it takes the better part of a year to travel from Hub, the center of the Interdependency, to End, the farthest planet from Hub. Without the Flow, it would take hundreds, maybe even thousands of years.
Spaceships are generally made in two classes: fivers and tenners. The idea is that fivers can hold enough supplies to last a crew for five years if something happens and they get kicked out of the Flow, while tenners can hold enough supplies for ten years. But not only is that not enough time to get anywhere if they miss a Flow shoal (an entry/exit point of a Flow stream), but the Flow is assumed to be so stable that no one bothers to make sure their space ships are fully stocked.
Unfortunately, the Flow is not as stable as it seems. In fact, it’s collapsing, which means the Interdependency is collapsing, hence the title of the first book of the series: The Collapsing Empire.
Scalzi uses the collapse of the Flow as a not-so-subtle reference to climate change. One scientist (who also happens to be a count on End) has been tasked with the chore of studying the Flow and it’s possible collapse. By the time the series begins, he’s collected more than three decades’ worth of data and he can definitively predict which Flow streams will collapse when.
Unfortunately, by the time he figures it out, it, they have only a matter of weeks, maybe months, before the first Flow stream is predicted to collapse. After that, it’ll be a domino effect of one Flow stream after another collapsing until each system is completely on its own.
This is a disaster because, aside from End, none of the planets are habitable, so everyone either lives below ground, in sealed domes aboveground, or on space stations. The Interdependency was set up so that each noble house commands a monopoly on certain goods, which means none of the systems are self-sufficient. Without access to the other systems of the Interdependency to provide food and supplies to keep their habitats running, they’ll die, which is why it’s called the Interdependency.
Poor Cardenia Wu-Patrick never thought she was going to be emperox (the gender-neutral term Scalzi chose to replace emperor/empress). She was the bastard of the previous emperox, Attavio VI. Her half brother, Rennered, was supposed to inherit the throne, but he died in an unfortunate racing accident and her father didn’t have any legitimate back-up children, so Cardenia is it. She was raised with a certain amount of privilege, but she was not raised in the giant palace on Hub and she was never trained to be emperox, so they have a lot of catching up to do in the year or so between her brother’s death and her father’s death.
It isn’t until after she becomes emperox that Cardenia learns that the Flow might be collapsing and she is imperially screwed.
As if that weren’t bad enough, people keep trying to kill her. Fortunately, they keep missing, but the people around her tend to become collateral damage, including her best friend.
Then Marce Claremont shows up to confirm what Cardenia had learned may or may not be happening – that the Flow streams are collapsing. Unfortunately, Marce is the only one with enough data to confirm the collapse of the Flow streams. He can (and does) share the data with other scientists and all of Parliament, but of course they can’t just go, “This is a huge problem. What can we do about it?” Instead they have to argue over the validity of his data because they’re more interested in maintaining their power than in admitting that it’s all coming down around their ears regardless of whether they acknowledge the problem.
Cardenia knows it’s going to be a battle to get the rest of the Interdependency to accept facts because the empire has seen this before. A Flow stream to another planet collapsed centuries ago. The emperox knew it was coming and tried to evacuate the planet, but no one would listen to her. When the Flow stream did, eventually, collapse, the emperox was blamed and even assassinated for her failure to convince everyone else to not be idiots.
Fortunately, Cardenia has some friends to help her out, including Marce, a hologram/spaceship who used to be a human named Thomas Chenevert, and (MY FAVORITE!!!) Kiva Lagos.
Kiva is a member of the Lagos family, which is one of the noble families of the Interdependency – they have a monopoly on citrus. She is foulmouthed and irreverent and really doesn’t care about anything except getting laid, and she’s not even picky about who she’s sleeping with.
She’s also very smart, and when you piss her off, you’re in for a world of trouble. Nadashe Nohamapetan, who happens to be behind the various plots to overthrow/kill the emperox, manages to piss off Kiva and the two of them have a glorious face-off at the end and I love it so much!
For a book that’s written by a dude, I really appreciated how feminist this series is. Most of the main characters are female, and they’re all badass in their own right. None of them felt like a stereotype and there were no drawn-out musings about the physical appearances of the female characters. It shouldn’t feel this miraculous when a dude manages to convincingly write female characters, but it is, and I am grateful that Scalzi manages to be one of the few dudes capable of seeing women as three-dimensional individuals instead of stereotypes.
Also, the final book in the trilogy was dedicated “to the women who are done with other people’s shit.” And for that, I thank you, Scalzi.