My review of this first novel in the The Interdependency Trilogy can be read here: https://cannonballread.com/2023/07/the-collapsing-empire-caesars-wife/. I continued to engage with Book 2 via Wil Wheaton’s incredible narration. He did an excellent job, again.
So, we pick up in Book 2 where we left off. The nefarious Nohamapetan family is attempting to recover from its botched attempted coup; the fledgling Emperox Grayland II is scrambling to convince her parliament of the impending collapse of the Flow, the method of interplanetary travel; and Lord Marce, the scientist and bearer of bad news about the Flow, is trying to help set the path for ‘what next’ for the Interdependency.
Space gets spacier in this novel, as Lord Marce leads an expedition into an area of space that was previously cut-off when the first Flow stream collapsed thousands of years earlier, and finds unexpected results awaiting.
The Nohamapetan’s get naughtier, as the family matriarch Countess Nohamapetan begins plotting – again – to take the throne.
Grayland gets more confident as she shares her prophecy visions to help guide (what she thinks are) the totality of humanity through the upheaval that will come with the collapse of the Flow.
As with any second-book-in-a-trilogy, we get to know meet some spicy new characters, including a deceased-captain-turned-actual-spaceship and the head of the Church of the Interdependency.
The entire novel seems to have been written to build up to a single scene at the end of the book, when Grayland gives her long-awaited address to the parliament. That single scene was so juicy, so satisfying, so fist-pumping, that it really was a worthwhile payoff.
This is a solid continuation of The Collapsing Empire, except for one detail: it’s missing the fourth estate. We’ve got the clergy/church, pursing it’s own agenda. We’ve got the nobility, the Wu’s and other important ‘houses’ / government, working to build and maintain power. And we have enough of the commoners/bourgeois (scientists, prisoners, staffers etc) to make the setting believable enough (although this could go a lot further…). What we are sorely missing is the media. Without any time or space given to the role of the media, it’s hard to feel that the Interdependency is real. Can you imagine, if suddenly the President of the United Nations announced that air travel would soon be impossible on earth? The role of the media in sharing and responding to that information would be mammoth. Think pieces, talking heads, speculation, human-interest stories… it would dominate the airwaves for months, years, decades. Yet in this story, there is nothing equivalent shared. As this novel progressed, I found it hard to really comprehend the weight of the impending Flow collapse. A few interspersed news stories between chapters would have gone a long way to ground the story and make this space opera all the more operatic.
Hopefully, the final book in the trilogy will get there, as I think this is fertile ground worth exploring as the impact of the Flow collapse moves from theory to reality.
Overall, 3 sharpened spoon shivs out of 5.
