The Collapsing Empire

I received this book without charge as part of the tor.com promotional book club's offerings.

I'd read a few of this author's books before and had already formed an idea of what kinds of things to expect when it comes to story, dialogue, structure, and all the other writerly elements. For the most part I wasn't surprised with what I encountered this time around.

It is the first book of a new series and thus has to sketch out the galaxy-building concepts the other stories will build upon, along with a framework for the characters who we will be meeting in different guises. It is driven at the level of extreme privilege in this society, with the one significant character not drawn from the ranks of nobility killed off before the halfway point. By itself, this would not be a fatal flaw, but I could tell early on that I would have to pay attention to which character was saying what, since there is practically no variation between the manner of speaking used by the different antagonists, a sort of hard-boiled futuristic wise-alecky patter that feels like a sort of trademark of this author's work. I wouldn't say that the characters were indistinguishable, because some care was taken to delineate the differing motivations between the characters and the nobles houses they represent. I did think the villainous characters talked too uch to come across as really evil, introverted, brooding, and mysterious characters in any way.

All the characters seem to come out of the same society, not showing any more variation between them than we see among cultures in our current world. I couldn't tell whether different planets had a single monolithic culture or many different ones, which to me seems like a shortcoming in the worldbuilding (though a common one in science fiction).

The characters are either old guard or young adults or nothing in particular, no children or teenagers among them. You didn't get the sense that they inhabit environments teeming with billions of individuals or isolated clusters of individuals on lonely rocks in space, they could have been in any medium to large city on Earth today. It makes for easily digestible fare, the kind of thing you can read quickly and absorb the gee-whiz touches here and there without having to work hard.

I feel that SF writers ought to leave whimsical merchant starship names to the legacy of Iain Banks instead of trying to adopt them as their own now.

As for the plot, a number of other readers have already commented on the parallels between the Interdependency collapse and the impending climate collapse we face now. It is different, since (so far) it appears not to have any kind of man-made aspect, but the popular response of denial and dismay is pretty much the same as what we see nowadays. For a possibly natural phenomenon spanning many star systems, it seemed implausible that it was going to play out over a decade or so after a millennium of quiet, with one exception, but I would guess that this is dictated by the kind of story he wants to tell that must not lend itself to being carried forward by multiple protagonists over a long time. It was a little work to suspend disbelief in this area. In the end, there is a small sort of action scene followed by a section of dialogue which explains everything that went on up to that point all packaged up without the reader to have to figure anything out.

I expect this series to go on for some years and to pick up nominations and awards, though not high honors. It was just okay, but I do not believe I will be going out of my way to pick up the rest of the series with so many other books on my list to be read.