When an alien diplomat is murdered during routine trade negotiotiations, all interplanetary Hell breaks loose. The Nidu refuse to make peace until
they receive a special offering for their upcoming coronation ceremony: a genetically-modified breed of sheep called the Android's Dream, created
specifically for their ruling class but inexplicably killed off on all colonies. Since the Nidu could easily turn Earth into cosmic dust, the
government scrambles to find any surviving strains of Android's Dream sheep... but not everyone wants the coronation to go off without a hitch, even
if it means plunging Earth into an interstellar war which its fledgeling fleet cannot hope to win.
Harry Creek was one of the few survivors of a devastating battle on alien soil, and would just as soon leave saving people and getting shot at behind
him. When an old friend in the State Department calls in a favor, he finds himself on a sheep hunt - an unusually dangerous sheep hunt. The trail leads
through hired assassins, traitors to country and species and memory, unexplored interplanetary legal and moral territory, and even the seemingly
crackpot dream of the ultimate fringe religion.
Review
Scalzi's tale is full of action and wit in more or less equal doses, though now and again his tangents and future-history lessons and such got in the
way of things. He also seemed bound and determined to avoid describing 90% of his characters in any meaningful measure, a trait I found subtly irritating.
Still, once the story got going it moved decently enough, and he pulled off a great ending.
In time almost lost to record and memory, humans reached out from their insignificant homeworld and discovered the Flow, a "current" enabling
faster-than-light travel... but, like a river of sorts, ships can only get "on" or "off" at certain "shoal" points. Though the Flow connections to
and from Earth were lost generations ago, the human Interdependency thrives, a network of worlds spread across hundreds of light years ruled by the
emperox, the church, and the merchant guild monopolies that keep each colony dependent on the others for survival. For all that rides on the Flow,
however, few have bothered to study and understand it. It's always been there for humans to exploit, after all, and surely it always will be.
Recent disruptions in Flow transit have created shipboard rumors, but nobody in the upper echelons seems to be listening. Too many people in power
have too much money riding on the status quo remaining status quo. But the rise of a new and unprepared emperox, a power grab by the Nohamapaten
guild, a rebellion on the far-flung world of End, and a secret researcher's chilling conclusions will force the Interdependency to face the one
thing it never wanted to see: the unstoppable collapse of the Flow network, leading to humanity's inevitable extinction.
Review
In part, I admit that this book is a victim of timing. I read it as my nation and our world are facing down apparent inevitable collapses which
have been coming, warned about and ignored for years, decades, generations even... and I'm watching as, like the people running the Interdependency,
those in charge (and arguably most responsible for us standing on the brink) choose a profitable extinction over costly survival. (In the afterword,
Scalzi claims that his choice of title, The Collapsing Empire, was not intended as a deliberate commentary on current affairs, but one has
to wonder if there wasn't some subconscious nudging at work.) So, despite this being a humorous (if somewhat blackly humorous) take on empire
building gone mad and ignorance/wishful thinking trampling science and fact until it's quite literally too late, at times I had to force myself to
laugh. It didn't necessarily help that I never connected with most of the characters, or a world that was blatantly built to profit the few at the
expense of the many (and the now at the expense of the future.) There's also a minor flaw in the overall plot, in that this is clearly just a
lead-in to a larger series; the ending feels incomplete and a trifle dissatisfying, without much of an in-book arc to conclude. There's some sharp
commentary and clever (occasionally curse-heavy and crude) humor, but ultimately I felt no compulsion to read onward. The whole just struck a little
too close to my reality, I fear.
Jamie knew it was a risk when he left his doctorate unfinished, but he saw a great opportunity with a new company. Six months later,
as COVID-19 was shutting down America, his billionaire boss fired him (but not before stealing his ideas)... just when his roommates are
about to leave him high and dry. Things couldn't be going much worse for him, until a chance meeting with an old acquaintance leads to a
peculiar job offer. Jamie doesn't even know what the job is, only that it involves remote field work helping "large animals", but he's
not in a position to argue. It's just as well he didn't know, because he wouldn't have believed it, not until he sees it with his own
eyes - the alternate Earth, a lush oxygen-rich jungle full of impossible creatures, and the "large animals" themselves: kaiju, almost
straight from an old movie.
The nuclear tests of the 1960's apparently thinned the barrier between Earth and other alternate worlds, including the one where the
immense monsters (more accurately considered mobile ecosystems, for their size and the multitude of parasites and symbiotic animals that
enable their survival) roamed. Since then, a top-secret global group known as the Kaiju Preservation Society has been traveling to their
world to study them and ensure their safety, keeping them from straying through any fissures to our own Earth. As the lone non-scientist
at Tanaka Base Camp, Jamie is the designated grunt worker, lifting and carrying and offering a hand wherever it's needed. He doesn't
exactly understand just what a creature as immense as a kaiju needs protecting from... until he has to escort his first visitors,
investors in the KPS, and remembers the question asked in so many films: who is the more dangerous monster, the kaiju or the
humans?
Review
The Kaiju Preservation Society has an inherently humorous premise, a conservation society dedicated to mountain-sized
monsters. It was written by Scalzi in direct response to the COVID lockdowns and other unsettling developments of 2020, and even with
the froth and silliness it addresses some of those issues on the sly, but much of the story is more about that froth, with frequent
banter and one-liners and callbacks to books, movies, and video games. The whole, of course, is an homage to kaiju movies. He even
offers speculation on how a creature as big as a kaiju could even survive when, by our world's physics and biological rules, they
should collapse under their own weight before taking a single step toward Tokyo... speculation that does come into play in the plot
eventually, but which also eats a lot of page time (as well as providing a lot of dialog into which to inject more humorous banter and
references). It was fun, true, with a bit of sense of wonder about it, but after a while I started hoping for a little more actual plot
or something like character development. It's past the halfway point before the story, such as it is, begins to kick into an actual
gear, though even in the buildup to the climax the characters just can't stop with the page-padding banter. I also could've used a
little more description of the kaiju themselves; part of what makes those movies fun is the weird creature designs, and I wanted to
"see" the monsters here, too, but they're mostly considered too immense and alien for more than the broadest of descriptors. I almost
forgave it those minor frustrations, but ultimately felt the froth-to-substance ratio skewed a little too far to the former, like
Scalzi was strutting and mugging and grinning at his own clever lines. Clever as those lines were, I still found myself wanting more
actual story by the end, enough to ultimately shave that half-star from the rating.
On John Perry's 75th birthday, he visited his wife's grave and joined the army - the Colonial Defense Forces, that is, charged with preserving and
expanding humanity's tenuous toehold in interstellar space. It's a one-way ticket off the planet, but if he survives his two-to-ten years of service,
he'll be rewarded with a homestead on a new world... not to mention the health and vitality to work it. For the CDF only recruits retirement-age men
and women from Earth, and though organ regeneration and other treatments have prolonged human life expectancy significantly, they must have something
special up their sleeves if they want to whip seventy-odd-year-old codgers into effective warriors. He didn't know what he expected to find when he
left Earth, but the CDF and the brutal realities of interstellar survival are only the start, as John finds himself becoming someone -
something - he never anticipated in his wildest dreams.
Review
This is a fast-paced story with plenty of interesting ideas behind it, and a fair degree of wit. The science feels solid enough without bogging down
the narrative excessively with theories and physics, and the aliens and battles are strange and gory enough to make Earth-based warfare downright quaint
in comparison. Perry isn't the only one who seems to be in over his head; humans in general seem to hardly know what they're doing in space, other than
fighting for the few habitable planets against beings they can barely understand, let alone effectively kill. I enjoyed it, and read it in a single day.
I really ought to pursue the rest of the series, though the backlog never seems to grow shorter...
