I wonder what John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy would have been like had Hillary Clinton won the Presidential election. Not in the overall shape or the major plot points, which I’m sure were pretty much fixed when Scalzi started thinking about the story back around 2014, but in tone and shading, especially toward the end of the series, with the last volume, The Last Emperox, released a few weeks ago.
The series itself, like most of Scalzi’s works, is character-focused, dialog-heavy, fast-moving and entertaining. He’s been slapped with the damning moniker “popular writer,” because his books are fun to read, they sell well, and he works in easter eggs of admired predecessors such as: Old Man’s War echoes Heinlein’s military space epics, Redshirts plays with Star Trek tropes, Fuzzy Nation riffs on Little Fuzzy, and so on that keep his readers on the lookout for callbacks, nods and tributes. It’s almost a cottage industry. The Interdependency trilogy echoes Frank Herbert’s Dune series, it’s said, although I think that particular analogy is a bit tortured. After all, writers working in the same medium often hit the same themes. All art influences other art, so there are going to be overlaps. And I’m aware that some higher-brow science fiction and fantasy readers will sniff at my labeling of Scalzi’s writing as art.
To them I say: Pound sand. Dickens’ contemporaries dismissed his work as populist trash because he wrote about popular topics and sold well. Dickens is rarely taught in university literature courses for the same reason Milton isn’t much taught: both are transparent in their themes. The study of literature is all too often determined by the clever things professors can reveal and the tricky themes that students can trace. We can discuss the nature of evil in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness endlessly, or its critique of imperialism and white supremacy; we can identify the many different layers of interpretation in Alice Walker’s superlative short story “Everyday Use” or anything Faulkner ever wrote, but put Oliver Twist or Paradise Lost on the syllabus and everyone goes mum. Why? They’re transparent. You understand them by reading them. And there’s only so much class time you can spend by appreciating Dickens’ wit and graceful prose, or Milton’s prosody and his characterization of Satan; the vast majority of effort is taken up with the act of reading itself. Critique proceeds on the meta-level.
Scalzi is much the same. He’s highly entertaining to read; the philosophy and the social critique creep up on you. Whether it’s about imperialism (Fuzzy Nation) or the brutal costs of conquest (Old Man’s War) or an economic system that runs on disposable humanity (Redshirts), etc., the critique is clear, transparent. His works read as parables about human nature, no matter the setting or scale.
The Interdependency is no different in this. It’s easiest read as a meditation about climate change, but not necessarily.
Set some 1500 years in the future, human beings have left Earth—first they left it, then lost it. And established The Interdependency, a mercantile-based system of different home worlds. None are self-sufficient; all but one are either space-based colonies or are located deep inside otherwise-hostile planets. After all, there are very few “Goldilocks” planets out there—only one, exactly, and aptly called End, because it’s the farthest point out from Hub, the center of the Interdependency. End is the place where malcontents and agitators have historically been sent. Think of End as the Australia of the Interdependency. It’s also the only place where people can walk around on the planet surface, the only place that is self-sustaining. Everywhere else provides some essential service or product and is ruled over by a noble family that holds a monopoly on its product. Everything is ruled over by an Emperox, one supreme leader who also heads the Church of the Interdependency.
This entity, the Interdependency, has been stable for a thousand years, far-flung worlds connected by trade, and trade dependent on something called the Flow.
The Flow is Scalzi’s mcguffin. As the narrator (there’s a narrator, an omniscient voice, appearing rarely and only when a data dump is required) explains,
In this universe there is no such thing as “faster-than-light” travel. The speed of light in not only a good idea, it’s the law. You can’t get to it; the closer you accelerate toward it, the more energy you need to keep going toward, and it’s a horrible idea to go that fast anyway, since space is only mostly empty, and anything you collide with at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light is going to turn your fragile spaceship into explody chunks of metal. And it would still take years, or decades, or centuries, for the wreckage of your spacecraft to zoom past wherever it was you originally planned to go.
There is no faster-than-light travel. But there is the Flow.
The Flow, generally described to laypeople as the river of alternate space-time that makes faster-than-light travel possible across the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds, called “the Interdependency” for short. The Flow, accessible by “shoals” created when the gravity of stars and planets interacts just right with the Flow, to allow ships to slip in and ride the current to another star. The Flow, which ensured the survival of humanity after it had lost the Earth, by allowing trade to thrive between the Interdependency, assuring that every human outpost would have the resources they’d need to survive — resources that almost none of them would have had on their own.
This was, of course, an absurd way of looking at the Flow. The Flow is not anything close to a river—it is a multidimensional brane-like metacosmological structure that intersects with local time-space in a topographically complex manner, influenced partially and chaotically but not primarily by gravity…. (1, pp. 14-15)
As I said, a mcguffin. Whatever. It works. Worlds hundreds of light-years distant are accessible in a matter of months. The Flow is a force that’s measurable, mathematically quantifiable and understandable, even if the number of Flow scientists who actually understand the mechanics that drive the Flow are few in number. Point is, the Flow is not a human construct, but a natural occurrence. Even though people use it, the Flow is indifferent to human wishes.
Sound familiar?
It will when the event that starts off the series becomes clear: the Flow is collapsing. Changing. Going away. It’s inevitable. Which is why many readers consider The Interdependency trilogy a parable of climate change. When the Flow collapses, the empire will collapse, stranding the many interdependent worlds from one another, leaving none of them with a means of survival, except for the one planet that can be self-sufficient.
Next week I want to focus on this aspect of the series — the implacability of science and the tendency of human beings to wish or bargain or ignore forces they can’t control. But back to my original point — how much of our current awful political situation can be read into Scalzi’s series. I didn’t make the connection in The Collapsing Empire (no spoilers here — the subject is pretty damn obvious) or in the second volume, The Consuming Fire.
But getting to The Last Emperox, the tone changes slightly. The Norhampatens are still uniformly horrible people and serve as the primary antagonists, with Nadashe Norhapaten being the primary villain. The family is fully as selfish and amoral as the current occupants of the White House and certain seats in Congress, but unlike Trump, Nadashe is smart.
I don’t believe that Scalzi would have changed his outline, and certainly not to accommodate the Trumps, but there’s a flavor and focus in The Last Emperox that’s different from the other novels. Kiva Lagos (one of Scalzi’s greatest characters) sees it this way, now that the collapse of the Flow streams is obvious even to the most obtuse denialist:
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.
2, pp. 44-45
It’s not until The Last Emperox that Nadashe gets to articulate her full plan, which is remarkably Trumpian in its callow wickedness. I have no doubt that Nadashe would still be as loathsome if Republican politics were not so nihilistic and wantonly cruel as they are but, given our times, the Interdependency acquires a certain on-the-nose immediacy. Scalzi himself has admitted that politics has futzed with his writing and he’s not alone; across disciplines, writers and artists have had a harder time in the Trump era being able to unplug from the world enough to create. He’s also said that while some of the uncanny similarities between his fiction and reality are unintentional,
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 …
1500 hundred years in the future, humans will still have the same problems, motivations and recognizable things that they do that we have. They will still be venal. They are still going to be willing to put their immediate circle of people in front of everybody else. On the flip side, they're also going to be willing to do things that are selfless, that are generous. But the human animal is not going to change.
It’s not the veniality of the antagonists that makes the difference, it’s the quality, the degree. In The Last Emperox, there’s a measure of uncaring in the Interdependency’s ruling elite that powerfully echoes the Republican party, even to letting billions of people die in order to ensure its preferred standard of living. Perhaps Scalzi planned from the start that Nadashe would say to her co-conspirators, “We can’t save everyone, so we save what’s important. Us,” (2, p. 99), but I suspect that the Trump administration put an extra spin on her and her companions.
It’s impossible to tell, in the end, how much the Trump Administration affected the telling of The Interdependency. But I believe it has. Because Scalzi wrote a post on his excellent Whatever blog (which you should follow), 2017, Word Counts, and Writing Process, about how hard it is to write in the Trump era:
It’s hard to focus when the world is on fire, and with novelists in particular, I suspect that sometimes it’s hard to focus when you’ve got the suspicion that your fiction is almost frivolous in the context of what’s going on right now.
Seriously — read the whole post. It’ll make you feel less alone.
I’ll want to spend a couple of weeks on this trilogy. It’s a fun and quick read, so one week is plenty of time for you to get into it. We’re all in quarantine anyway; it’s not like you’ll miss out on a street festival or a movie date. Next week we’ll talk about science and science denialism, the parallels with climate change and the adaptability of the human species.
Until then, I recommend you read. Cardenia is a great protagonist, and Kiva Lagos runs a compelling, if profane, character arc. There are villains who are brilliant, some who are remarkably obtuse, a couple of science nerds, pirates, and even a dash of true love. Oh, and AI. Some charming AI. You’ll see.
References
1. Scalzi, John. The Collapsing Empire. NY: Tor, 2017.
2. Scalzi, John. The Last Emperox. NY: Tor, 2020.