Be forewarned: I tried my best, but this diary is spoiler-heavy. I also tried to do it all in one piece but it’s just too long so…. Current plans involve finishing next week.
For the last few weeks I’ve been writing about John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy, the latest and final volume of which, The Last Emperox, was published last month. It’s set in a distant galaxy some 1500 years in the future. It is entirely fictional.
It is also almost impossible not to read it through the lens of current politics. For Scalzi, this is not off-brand. In his long-running Whatever blog, he doesn’t shy away from politics, this year changing his signature tagline from “This machine mocks fascists” to “Time to register to vote.”
In a recent NPR interview, Scalzi said of science fiction in general and his work in particular:
...so many things in the books just sort of match up in parallel with what's going on in the world. And some of that was completely unintentional, it was just the pace of the story. But some of it was. I live in the world. Science fiction is written about the future, but it takes place — you know, the people who write it live now. So it is almost axiomatic that what's happening in the world now is going to affect how the stories get told.
Some of it was.
It’s in that spirit that I’m going to read the Interdependency novels as a critique of our recent social history, or rather an examination of it. In this discussion I’m not going to focus on plot but on the forces that drive the plot. This is not the only way to read these novels. Yeah, I know that’s obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs to be said.
Volume 1, The Collapsing Empire both outlines the problem and gives away the game. If you’ve read parts 1 and 2 of this discussion, you already know that the far-flung Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds is screwed. The Flow, the transportation mechanism by which trade is made possible, is going away, and the whole point of the Interdependency is that it’s interdependent. Each individual world, whether it’s tunneled inside a barren planet or located near a barren planet, depends on trade with the others for sustenance. For a thousand years the Flow has been stable. Now it’s not, and the only planet capable of self-sustenance is End, unimaginatively so named because it’s at the far end of the Empire, and the place to which malcontents and agitators have been sent. And it’s currently in the middle of a civil war.
So. The empire is going to collapse. There’s no empire without the Flow, and the Flow is going away. That’s the constant running in the background. It’s inevitable. It doesn’t care about belief, or feelings, or wishes, or anything that puny humans might do. It’s science — and indifferent to whatever the wealthy and powerful might prefer.
If you’re thinking climate crisis right now, I’d say, Join the club. This is why, although the story is about itself (and actually I’ve written very little about the plot and I don’t plan to change that), the thematics lurking behind the story are relevant today.
Against the impending crisis, a crisis which the outgoing emperox suspected would arise at some point and therefore protected his friend Jamies Claremont, one of the very few Flow scientists capable of studying the interstellar phenomenon, by sending him and his family to End, there is Cardenia. Following the accidental death of the designated heir, the dying Emperox Batrin Wu (Attavio IV) names his illegitimate and very unprepared daughter Cardenia Wu-Patrick his heir, and recommends she take the imperial name Grayland II.
Before I go on to why the name Grayland is important, I should mention that, structurally, the Interdependency trilogy is something of a mess. It’s a pleasant mess, and thoroughly entertaining to read, but still a bit lopsided in that it reflects Scalzi’s changing focus over the time it took for him to write the trilogy. For instance, a substantial part of The Collapsing Empire involves Marce Claremont’s escape from End, and develops characters who probably played larger roles in the trilogy’s conceptual form but have become minor by the third volume. I forget who said it, but the art of revision in storytelling is to make sure that the ass end matches the face, and that’s not always possible when the face is already in print, but the ass end is still in manuscript. If the writer’s perspective has shifted, the choice lies between telling the original story or telling a better version. I suspect that the change in focus in an evolving response to the situation(s) unfolding in both the fictional world and the real one. Characters don’t always do what writers want them to do, any more than politicians do. I’m rather pleased that Scalzi went with the better story, even though it made the form a bit lumpy.
Anyway, the aforesaid Marce is the scientist son of Batrin’s exiled scientist friend. Marce’s father, Jamies Claremont, has been sending his friend the emperox regular updates but, when he receives confirmation that the entire Flow system is going to collapse, he knows he can’t just send the data—he has to send an interpreter.
“It’s one thing to keep the emperox updated when I’m just crunching through the data and refining the model. It’s another thing entirely when the model is verified, and real, and a threat to the Interdependency. He’s going to need someone to walk him through it all. And then argue with everyone from scientists to politicians who want to poke holes in it for their own purposes.” (1, p. 97)
Now, you remember that I mentioned End is in the middle of a civil war, right? When we’re first introduced to Marce, he’s running a planetarium show for a bunch of school kids on a field trip, not because he’s supposed to, but because the kids are scared and there’s no one else around. So we really like Marce. Jamies sends him to brief the emperox, and no small part of the plot involves Marce getting off the planet and avoiding being a hostage.
Marce is not alone in having to leave. Many of End’s wealthier citizens are anxious to avoid the fighting and they bribe their way on to an outgoing ship — Kiva Lagos’ ship, whose captain Blinnikka observes of the exodus:
“It’s just a reminder that war favors the rich. The ones who can leave, do. The ones who can’t, suffer.” (1, p. 114)
Published in 2016 and finished during the turmoil of the 2016 Presidential election, The Collapsing Empire has more than a strain of current politics running through its text, whether it’s despicable characters angling for influence or wealthy selfish individuals trying to get wealthier through theft, or extortion, or graft, or war profiteering. Hey look — something for everyone.
The passengers certainly didn’t look like refugees. They looked like what they were — wealthy people. They were milling with their children and their stacks of cargo...as if they were about to have an adventure, rather than flee a planet forever.
Despite the fact that he fully intended to be one of them, Marce managed to feel resentment toward them, toward the people who could, in fact, leave their problems behind through the simple application of money. (1, pp 179-180)
Back to Grayland: As we discussed in Part 2, Grayland I was assassinated when the separate Flow streams to and from the Dalasýsla system mysteriously and calamitously disappeared. If you want to refresh your memory, go ahead. If you want the short version: Grayland I had some advance warning that the Flow to and from Dalasýsla was unstable and wanted to take action, but was stymied by political infighting and bureaucratic stagnation. When swift action was necessary, the committee approach: deliberate, study, argue, dissolved into political infighting — it just doesn’t work, and she was blamed.
Grayland II has some notice that it’s going to happen again, and she’s smart enough to know that the approach the first Grayland took won’t work. Marce brings her the news that the Flow streams are collapsing, like...now, and the Interdependency will end within her lifetime. Farming the crisis out to specialists won’t work (sound familiar?).
Grayland needs another approach. In Volume 2, The Consuming Fire, she proclaims religious visions about the end of the Flow. Since the Interdependency was founded by visions from the first emperox, Rachela I, (it was a con), since Grayland is Rachela’s direct descendant and the head of the Church of the Interdependency, she has inherited the right to have religious visions, and it just might work. Her father’s consciousness tells her it’s unlikely to work (all of the previous experoxes have their consciousnesses stored in a place called the Memory Room, which only the emperox can enter), mostly because Rachela was building an empire that was in everyone’s interest to join, while Grayland is trying to dissolve it, pleasing no one.
”I know all of that,” Cardenia said. “I also considered that we’ve already had one Flow stream closed up and that more will close soon after. I know that I don’t have time to build consensus in the parliament or among the guilds or even among the scientists before things start to fall apart. I need to get out ahead of the crisis in a way that lets me save as many people as possible. The way to do that is through the church. And the way to do that is in a way that gives the church no doctrinal way to argue. By claiming prophecy.” (1, pp. 48-49)
Predictably, everyone from the archbishop to the Mercantile Guilds finds these visions inconvenient. Similarly, appeals from faith leaders today that it’s a sacred duty to care for our planet fall on deaf ears among the congregants. See why this is so readable as a climate crisis parable?
Meanwhile, on the rational argument front, Grayland assigns Marce to explain to the other scientists and politicians just what is happening and why, which he considers on a par with banging his head repeatedly on hard flat surfaces.
[I]t wasn’t just the Flow physicists. Every group of scientists, in every discipline, had given him static about the data he and his father had collected and interpreted. Marce had been genuinely flummoxed by it until he thought back on his days in academia and what the chair of his department had once told him, about colleagues who were bound and determined to relate every new finding to their own area of expertise and that area only….
...There were more than a few scientists who knew only one little thing, and then thought that knowledge was universally applicable to every other problem, to the point of excluding or discounting information from people whose specialty was that other problem. (2, pp.79-80)
In the middle of convincing everyone about a crisis that is already breaking over their heads even as everyone officially Doesn’t Want To Hear It, a possible saving grace opens — Marce learns that Flow streams are dynamic and, just occasionally, can open and close in new spaces. One temporarily opens to the cut-off system of Dalasýsla, enabling Marce and a small team to go there and appraise the damage. To their astonishment, they find that humanity has adapted and survived; although their hardships are great and their circumstances desperate, the Dalasýslans prove that people are tougher and more resilient than we give ourselves credit for being.
While in Dalasýsla, Marce meets a … well, it’s complicated and I’m trying not to be too spoilery, but it tells him,
”There were once millions of Dalasýslans, living rich and comfortable lives, and that number was winnowed down to a mere few hanging on by their proverbial fingernails. Not because they were cut off from the rest of the universe but because in the first few critical years after being cut off, they lost their collective minds. Or enough of them did that the others had to spend precious time dealing with them, and not the larger situation.” (2, p. 269)
The evanescent Flow streams show promise, not for saving the empire, but possibly for saving humanity, if humanity becomes smart and nimble, and doesn’t lose its collective mind. Therein lies the problem.
The subtle and difficult science, the effects of which are already in evidence, along with the religious visions of the emperox, while a formidable combined front, are no match for the unfettered greed and shortsightedness of the ruling class, a large number of whom band together to overthrow the ruler. It doesn’t quite work out the way they expect, but their treason is a wake-up call for Cardenia/Grayland who, with the aid of some deep datamining artificial intelligence, is able to sweep up all the conspirators even as her church affirms her divine visions.
It’s not gonna be enough to change the trajectory, or cure Grayland’s opponents of selfish stupidity. Next week, we’ll finish up with The Last Emperox, and Scalzi’s appraisal of what it’ll take to save the species.
References
1. Scalzi, John. The Collapsing Empire. NY: Tor, 2017.
2. Scalzi, John, The Consuming Fire. NY: Tor, 2018.
3. Scalzi, John. The Last Emperox. NY: Tor, 2020.