The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on March 21, 2017

The Collapsing Empire is the first book in a trilogy. The last book was recently published. I’ll read it after I finish the second novel, which (like the first one) the publisher kindly provided for review.

Interstellar travel in the Interdependency trilogy is possible because certain places in the universe are connected by navigable streams (“rivers of alternate space-time”) called the Flow. Each stream moves in one direction but is conveniently paired with a stream that moves in the opposite direction.

Humans established a presence in a few dozen star systems by traveling to them via the Flow. In most systems, humans live underground or in orbiting habitats. The humans in each system trade with humans in other systems through the Flow streams. All the humans belong to the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds, also known as the Interdependency.

While the streams remain stable for a considerable time, they sometimes shift or disappear. The stream to Earth collapsed about a millennium before The Collapsing Empire takes place. Another stream collapsed a couple of hundred years later, causing the loss of contact with the inhabitants of that system. The remaining systems of the Interdependency rely on the Flow for trade, and none of those habitats have sufficient resources to enable their long-term survival if they were cut off from the others.

The human presence at the center of the Interdependency (where flow streams converge) is called Hub, while the habitat that is farthest from the others is called End, because future humans are remarkably unimaginative. End is the only place on which humans actually colonized a planet. If the Flow streams disappear, End is the last hope for survival of the humans living in the Interdependency.

The imperial dynasty for some time has been the House of Wu. The emperox has ruling authority throughout the empire, although the emperox is advised by an executive committee that represents the legislature, the church, and trade unions. The emperox dies early in the novel, making his illegitimate daughter Cardenia the new emperox. It is a job she doesn’t particularly want.

So that’s the background against which the trilogy is set. The background, however, is about to be disrupted. A physicist named Hatide Roynold concluded that the Flow streams would soon rearrange, establishing End rather than Hub as their nexus. Her research was privately funded by the House of Nohamapetan, which hopes to keep her findings a secret so that the knowledge could be exploited to the family’s advantage. Lord Ghreni Nohamapetan on End and Lady Nadashe Nohamapetan on Hub are the novel’s principal villains.

However, a physicist on End, the Count of Claremont, has been secretly funded by the emperox. Claremont, assisted by his son Marce, determined that Roynold was wrong and that all the streams will soon collapse, isolating each system from every other system. Hence, the novel’s title and the driver of the plot.

Nearly all of this novel is a setup for the story to come. It introduces key characters, including Cardenia, Marce, Lady Kiva from the House of Lagos (a family of traders), and the villains. Political machinations include a couple of attempted assassinations on Hub and a rebellion on End. We learn a bit about Cardenia’s insecurities, revealed largely in conversation with the computer-stored constructs of earlier dynasty members who held the position of emperox. A romance or perhaps just lust begins to blossom between Cardenia and Marce, while lust pretty much defines the personality of Kiva.

The novel is of no more than average length, which makes me wonder whether the story might have been better told as a Dune-length novel rather than breaking it into three books. The book does not work as a standalone because no self-contained story is resolved. That makes The Collapsing Empire difficult to review — it’s like reviewing the first third of a novel — given that whether the novel is a worthy read will depend on the success of the trilogy as a whole. I can say, however, that the novel held my interest, that it moves quickly, and that the premise is intriguing.

RECOMMENDED

The Good Killer by Harry Dolan

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on February 4, 2020

The Good Killer is worth reading just for the epilogue. It balances a dark story with a message of healing, a suggestion that there is a path out of the darkness.

Sean Tennant joined the military with his best friend, Cole Harper. Cole’s brother Jimmy was disappointed that Sean didn’t talk Cole out of the military adventure. Cole lost a foot in the war, for which Jimmy blamed Sean. Later, Sean decided to pursue a theft that went sideways. Jimmy blames Sean for bringing Cole along. Now Sean is on the run from Jimmy. Accompanying Sean are Molly Winter and Cole’s ghost. At least, Sean carries on conversations with Cole, although to others, he seems to be talking to himself.

The victim of the theft, Adam Khadduri, lost cylinder seals valued at a few million dollars. He also lost Molly, or she lost him before telling Sean where to find his valuables. Like Jimmy, Khadduri is trying to track down Sean.

Sean and Molly have new identities and feel reasonably safe until Sean stumbles across an angry man in a mall who is shooting random customers to impress Rose, the woman who rejected him. Sean shoots the killer, saving Rose and earning the status of a folk hero. But since his picture, captured on security cameras, is now on cable news, Sean and Molly need to flee before Khadduri or Jimmy Cole find them.

After the shooting, law enforcement agents who know about his theft are also looking for Sean. He is occasionally recognized by people in small towns, but since Sean and Molly have attained the status of cult heroes, there isn’t much risk that anyone will turn them in. America loves its celebrities.

Some of this seems improbable and forced. In particular, I didn’t buy Jimmy’s vendetta. Khadduri has a stronger motivation to chase down Sean, so the story is at last partially believable. In the end, if a reader can buy into the premise, The Good Killer delivers a satisfying action story.

The law enforcement characters have standard law enforcement personalities. Sean isn’t necessarily an admirable guy, but he at least feels remorse about his reckless behavior, which accounts for the ghost of Cole that he carries in his head. While taking out a mall killer might be seen as an act of redemption, I never entirely warmed to Sean. While I prefer conflicted bad guys to stalwart good guys, Sean seems more like an artificial construct whose job is keep the plot moving than a flesh-and-blood character. The “dead best friend in my head” theme has been done so many times that it comes across as a shopworn tool of the writing trade.

Although I didn’t entirely buy the story and wasn’t in love with Sean, Harry Dolan scores points by underplaying Sean’s ability. He is far from a typical thriller superhero. I was more intrigued by the characters of Molly and Rose, although they both play much smaller roles. In fact, Rose is a negligible character until the epilogue, when she reappears to give the story an emotional power that is absent until that point. The Good Killer is an uneven performance, but it does maintain an escalating level of tension, and its touching epilogue earned it a recommendation.

RECOMMENDED

Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Del Rey on April 21, 2020

My objection to most fantasy novels is that writers too easily resort to magic (or godlike powers) to make things happen for the convenient purpose of advancing the plot. Robert Jackson Bennett, on the other hand, is scrupulous about creating rules that govern the universes he creates. Bennett's rules are the analog of the laws of physics in our universe.

In the Founders trilogy (of which Shorefall is the second installment), reality is affected by scrivings that trick objects into believing that the rules are something other than they would otherwise be. Objects float because they are told that gravity makes them rise rather than fall. Wheels turn without propulsion because scrivings convince them that turning is what wheels do. The instructions that give definitions to scrivings are stored in large devices known as lexicons. How mere humans came to learn about scriving is not entirely clear at this point, but the explanation appears to be unfolding.

Foundryside ended with its protagonist, Sansia Grado, facing a perilous future. The peril heightens in Shorefall as Crasedes Magnus — perhaps the first of the long-vanished hierophants and known to some as the Maker — travels to Tevanne, the city-state in which the Foundries operate. Crasedes plans to take control of the lexicons to restore his ability to remake reality to suit his purposes. To do that, he must overcome another godlike being, a powerful “construct” known as Valeria whose scrived permissions restrain her from confronting Crasedes directly. Crasedes gets an initial assist from Ofelia Dondalo, Gregor's conflicted mother.

Gregor's heroism in Foundryside finds new expression in Shorefall. Gregor’s mommy issues are reflected in other characters who have difficult parents, although the novel’s biggest surprise involves a key character from Foundryside who is dismayed to discover that he has a troublesome child. (You need to read Foundryside to catch the pun in the last sentence.)

Sansia, Berenice Grimaldi, Orso Ignacio, and Gregor Dandalo are the primary returning characters from Foundryside. Each grows in his or her own way. Each confronts adversity, gains strength, and finds a way to cope. The heroes in Bennett’s novels always remind readers of the need to place the common good ahead of their own desires — a message that resonates in these troubled times. While all the heroes in Shorefall risk their lives repeatedly for the welfare of the world they know, a couple of characters engage in acts of self-sacrifice that will change them, or end them, because they see no other choice. One reason I keep coming back to Bennett is that he makes me feel good about the human race, even if his humans live in a different universe.

There is usually a moral conflict in a Jackson novel. Shorefall presents two views of how power might be used. One powerful character wants to make the world a better place by taking control of humans and directing them toward pursuits that do not involve violence or corruption, a sort of benevolent enslavement. A competing powerful character wants to make the world a better place by taking away scriving, which would prevent the owners of lexicons from exploiting everyone else, although a few million people would die when everything collapses. Both powerful beings believe they have good intentions, but their laudable ends may not justify such destructive means.

Despite its philosophical underpinnings, Shorefall offers abundant action. I admire Jackson’s ability to create imaginative problems that can only be overcome by devising clever but dangerous solutions. Shorefall doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, but the resolution creates a temporary lull in a larger story that will continue in the final novel. Jackson and his publisher made me wait twenty agonizing months for the second novel after the first one was published. I hope we don’t have to wait as long for the last one.

RECOMMENDED

Braised Pork by An Yu

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Grove Press on April 14, 2020

Braised Pork tells the story of a woman who is struggling to cope with the demands of a changing life. Wu Jia Jia’s husband, Chen Hang, killed himself while kneeling over their bathtub, leaving her with an expensive apartment and little money with which to maintain it. She wants to sell the Beijing apartment, but rumors of her husband’s suicide have made buyers view the apartment as a place of misfortune.

Jia Jia thinks about moving in with her father, but is shocked to learn that he remarried while she was grieving her husband’s loss. Her other option, living with her grandmother and aunt, is difficult because they have settled into a way of life that makes her feel like an outsider. Finding a new husband might solve her problems, but the parents of the only man she has dated — the bartender at the tavern where she spends her evenings — believe it would be bad luck for their son to marry a widow.

Jia Jia attended art school and has some talent, but Chen Hang thought it would be inappropriate for her to sell her paintings. Now that he is gone, she contemplates a sketch he made of a fish with a man’s head. She obsessively paints her own version of the fish man but can never visualize the face that belongs on the fish’s body. In the meantime, she has been commissioned to paint a scene with Buddha on the wall of a friend’s home.

All of this is background for the true story, which involves visions or dreams or shared experiences in which Jia Jia and others encounter the fish man in a world made of water — a world that, in their view, represents true reality. Jia Jia feels compelled to take a trip to Tibet, where she finds a crude sculpture of the fish man in a small village and later discovers a connection between an old villager and her own family.

The recurring appearance of the fish man is something that might be found in a fable, but most of Braised Pork is grounded in a more recognizable reality. Exactly what the fish man represents or symbolizes — whether the fish man even exists, or is the product of mental illness — is ambiguous. In at least one case, the belief that we live in a world made of water seems to drive someone mad, perhaps because that person believes the world of water took everything from her. That person’s husband comes to believe that there are “two kinds of people: those who need boundaries, and those who will die from them.” Whether the body can be separated from the rest of human experience is one of the philosophical questions that An Yu poses to her readers.

I’m not sure quite what to make of the fish man. Despite its central importance to the story, I was drawn more to the life that Jia Jia is trying to make after the death of her husband — her uncertain relationship with the bartender, her reconnection with her father, her decision to start making art again. Jia Jia has an appealing resilience. Whether she has experienced visions that open a gateway to a different concept of reality or is suffering from a mental illness, her determination to place the best interpretation on her encounter with the water world, and to take something positive from its darkness, offers a ray of light in an otherwise dark story.

RECOMMENDED

The Cask by Freeman Wills Crofts

First published in 1920; republished by Dover on May 15, 2019

This hundred-year-old classic was mystery writer Freeman Wills Crofts’ first published novel. Notable for its detail, the novel is both a police procedural and a detective story that challenges the reader to guess both whodunit and how’d he do it.

While supervising the unloading of casks from a steamship, a young clerk discovers gold sovereigns and a woman’s body in a broken cask. He and the manager of the shipping company report the discovery to Inspector Burnley at Scotland Yard. By the time Burnley arrives at the ship, however, the cask has disappeared.

Burnley’s investigation is methodical. He first tracks down Léon Felix, to whom the cask was shipped from France, and gets an elaborate account of the circumstances that led the shipment. Felix produces a typewritten letter from the sender, Alphonse Le Gautier. Felix assumes the cask contains a statute and some money. Burnley then tracks down the cask and opens it in the presence of Felix, who is distressed to find the body of Annette Boirac, the wife of Raoul Boirac. On her body is a typewritten note that refers to the repayment of a loan.

Burnley works with the chief of a Paris police, Chauvet, to investigate the crime from the French side. Chauvet assigns a detective named Lefarge, with whom Burnley has worked before. The two police detectives learn that Annette had taken leave of Raoul, who seems genuinely sorrowed to learn of her strangulation. The detectives assemble a case that points not to Raoul as the killer (he has an alibi) or to Gautier, who denies writing the letter or note, but to Felix, who was once infatuated with Annette, although he claims that the infatuation died before she married Raoul, a fellow art collector with whom Felix became friends.

The meticulous investigation involves multiple witness interviews, inspections of typewriters, and the discovery of incriminating evidence in Felix’s home. The police take care to make no assumptions and to look for all possible evidence of innocence as well as guilt, providing a model that modern American police detectives should emulate. Although they work long but civilized hours, Burnley and Lefarge never miss a meal, often dining together and enjoying a bottle of wine before resuming their investigation.

The case seems airtight, but in the exercise of due diligence, Felix’s solicitor hires a private detective named Georges La Touche. The detective admires the strong work done by Burnley and Lefarge, retraces every step of the investigation, and cannot spot a flaw. There seems no hope for Felix until, inspired by the sight of a beautiful woman in Paris (and who wouldn’t be?), he moves the investigation in a different direction and solves the crime.

Will the reader solve it? The whodunit offers only a few suspects, so guesswork might lead to a happy result, but the “how” is so intricate that the reader will need to be a more skilled armchair detective than most to figure it out before La Touch explains it all.

Crofts’ characters all display old world charm. The plot is enjoyable, although the wealth of detail requires patience and a good memory. No stone is left unturned, and then La Touche turns them all over a second time. This is a police procedural on steroids, although one that relies on plodding attention to detail rather than Sherlockian insight. Fans of fast-moving modern thrillers who can’t abide sentences of more than six words will probably find The Cask to be a poor choice. Readers who prefer cerebral fiction to shootouts will find pleasure in this ground-breaking novel.

RECOMMENDED