If you’ve been around for the last few weeks, you know we’ve been talking around John Scalzi’s latest trilogy, The Interdependency. If you want to catch up, here are the previous installments:
I wrote “talking around” deliberately; since so many people haven’t yet read the final volume, The Last Emperox and since I don’t want to mar anyone’s reading pleasure, we’ve been talking about thematics and the larger issues that Scalzi raises in this series. In keeping with that ideal, I’m not doing much with plot; anyone who’s familiar with Scalzi’s writing knows that he’s fun and engaging and his plots are roller-coasters, and anyone who isn’t familiar with him should be, and I won’t spoil that. Or at least I’ll keep it as spoiler-free as possible.
In previous weeks I outlined how the series reads as a take on the crisis of our time: not the COVID-19 pandemic, awful as that is. For one thing, back in 2016 no one could have predicted the emergence of a new disease whose symptoms manifest so variously, whose transmission is still not really understood, and whose deadliness has yet to be fully appraised; no, I’m talking about the crisis that is likelier to kill us all — the eradication of our species from global warming, the destruction of our habitats, the failure of our food supply, the emergence of other diseases and exacerbation of violence and civil war that will drive floods of refugees, as entire zones of the globe become uninhabitable. Not to mention the destruction and devastation of all the other species we share space with. Just from a selfish point of view, our dependence on burning fossils in all their various forms has screwed us magnificently, and too many powerful people driving the process think they’re exempt from its effects.
Fantasy operates on metaphor; it can make metaphor real and, treating it as a real thing, it can then explore its complexities without getting bogged down in the politics that inevitably attends realism. A climate change novel, for instance, will attract adherents and detractors based, not on the novel itself, but on agreement or disagreement with the author’s premises (see commentary around Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 for an illustration of this phenomenon in action). In Scalzi’s Interdependency, the mechanism by which the world is dying is less important than the fact that the world (worlds, rather) is actually dying, and there’s only one safe harbor, End, at the end of the empire. It’s science, and science doesn’t care about your beliefs.
Emperox Grayland II understands the scope of the crisis. She also knows what won’t work, and what the stakes really are. For an unprepared emperox, she comes up to speed quickly, aware that the rational approach is a dead-end.
“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.” (1, pp. 48-49)
We got into the failure of the rational approach last week. Grayland’s resort to religious argument similarly fails; faith isn’t enough to overcome greed, or to make narcissists care about anything beyond themselves. The oligarchy of the Empire simply can’t let go of their selfish interests enough to consider anything beyond their own profit margins and their own power relative to their peers. Grayland’s sweep-up of the traitors who planned to take her down at the end of The Consuming Fire might have worked, but treason is a hydra, and in The Last Emperox she muses about her priorities:
“I could stop these coups,” Grayland said. “I have the information and I know the actors and I know where they are. Well, most of them. I could declare martial law and throw all of them in jail, just like I did with the last coup. But when I do that, I just stop this set of attempted coups. There will be more. There have always been more. Since the very first day I became emperox. Stomp down on one and two more pop up. And meanwhile, what I need to be focusing on doesn’t get focused on.”
“Saving the Interdependency,” Chenevert said.
Grayland shook her head. “No. It’s doomed no matter what we do. We can’t stop the Flow streams from collapsing. We can’t save the empire. We need to save its people. Not just some of them. Not just the nobles. We need to save all of them. I need to save all of them. That’s my job, as far as I can see.” (3, p. 150)
How to save the people when their leaders have other, shall we say, priorities is a real problem, as Kiva Lagos realizes.
Things had reached a certain tipping point for selfish and self-interested human beings. As far as Kiva could tell, whenever selfish humans encountered a wrenching, life-altering crisis, they embarked on a journey of five distinct stages:
1. Denial.
2. Denial.
3. Denial.
4. Fucking Denial.
5. Oh shit everything is terrible grab what you can and run. (3, pp. 44-45)
In other words, if you’re counting on the milk of human kindness to get through an existential crisis, you’ll die of thirst.
This is one of Scalzi’s great strengths in this trilogy, which I think is going to endure as one of his more important works — he doesn’t minimize the crisis’ complexity or manipulate it to make a solution easier. Because even if Grayland could save all her people and get them to End, the Interdependency numbers something like twenty billion people, and End is a small planet. There is simply not enough room for everyone. And while the inhabitants of the Interdependency are educated and informed, they’re also people — which means that, like most of us, they’re willing to sit back and believe that their government, their rulers, their institutions, will operate with their best interests at heart. Smart people will solve this for us. Even as their rulers, most of them, would sell their own parents to make a slightly greater profit.
Sound familiar?
This is Grayland’s dilemma: how to save too many people where there isn’t enough space to put them, not enough ships to transport them, in a dying economic system in which things are going to get very bad very quickly, and no one else is willing to see the problem for what it is. Building consensus has failed and attempted autocracy has failed; Grayland has few options, indeed.
Applying this very depressing scenario to our own real-world crisis is also depressing, indeed; it implies that we are fated to endure civil war, the ravages of heat and the collapse of markets, and our descendents will be, like the Dalasýslans, the ravaged and tattered survivors of an apocalypse.
But….ah, but. Chenevert has told Marce in The Consuming Fire that the Dalasýslans didn’t have to collapse the way they did:
”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)
It was the loss of their collective minds that sparked the disaster, in the short term, anyway, not the collapse of the habitat itself. Now, if working within the parliamentary system will fail (too slow and bureaucratic) and autocracy, even if enlightened, will fail (too coup-y), a third approach is needed. Grayland has to find a way to prise power out of the hands of her powerful oligarchs, her ambitious generals, her scheming Guild families and nobles. She needs to strip away their trade secrets, their confidential arrangements, their coded bank accounts, their monopolies — she needs to undo the imperial part of the empire — in order to make them no more important than the people they represent. She cannot do this from inside the system.
You can read the books, obviously, as just fiction, but more preciently, they are a call to action in our world, once in which a difficult solution is possible, provided we can stave off the worst of the first wave of disaster, buying ourselves time for our own clever Flow scientists to figure out how to move, not just people, but possibly their habitats into a position around the one habitable planet where trade will still be achievable. It won’t be the empire we knew, but it might well be the best we can hope for, one in which people more than nations can survive. It’s an idealistic prescription, revolutionary in its political implications and rejecting capitalist consumerism and petty mercantilism.
Downright revolutionary, not in an anarchic bomb-in-the-car-trunk sense of revolution, but a reorientation of values and civic awareness. This trilogy has been hailed as eerily timely — and it is, but there’s a deeper and rarely-discussed layer that I’ve teased out here: what it means for us. I don’t claim that Scalzi has solved the climate crisis. Far from it. What he has managed to do in this parable-that’s-not-a-parable is to give a serious and realistic treatment of just how difficult world-altering events can be navigated, and the kind of leadership it takes to drive solutions.
The implications of the novels are such that, if we’re foresighted and fearless, we might sight a path forward out of this mess we’ve let to be created, this crisis that will consume us. We can’t stop it from happening, but if we don’t lose our collective minds, we might just be able to survive. The Interdependency is not a road map, but it’s the beginnings of a blueprint.
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.