• Full Title: The Consuming Fire
• Authors: John Scalzi
• Year: 2018
• Genre: Science Fiction, Intrigue
• Publisher: Tor
• ISBN 978-0-7653-8897-1 (library hardcover)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia Page

 

Summary

This book follows The Collapsing Empire and is the second in the Interdependency series. While the first book seemed to mostly establish characters, themes, and the setting, The Consuming Fire gets the plot moving more firmly. In essence, “The Flow” (the method humans use to traverse the vast distances between star systems) is changing, stranding some systems and opening branches to others. The Interdependency has depended on The Flow for generations and now is in danger of collapse. While various guild houses practice intrigue around the Emperox (head of state and church), a Flow scientist uncovers more interstellar mystery — and my favorite Scalzi character to date (Kiva Lagos) continues her admirable shenanigans.

 

What I Liked Least About It

As with The Collapsing Empire, this book failed to have an ending; it merely sets up the third book in the trilogy (The Last Emperox). Note that there are subplots that end with the book.

There were a couple of instances where I thought “anachronism!” One character uses the phrase “tinfoil hat”, for example, when referring to a conspiracy theory. Several times, “protein bar” is mentioned. Of course, there’s no way to know which phrases or products will survive thousands of years into the future, but both of these seemed like very now things that I wouldn’t expect to see or hear in a time so distant from mine.

I also found what I assume were editing glitches, where verbs didn’t match the rest of the sentence. For example, “starting doing” should have been “started doing”. I assume the author initially wrote “starting” and then later added the “doing” but forgot to change the first verb. This happens to me quite often when going back to edit.

Also: lack of character descriptions and forward-backward time jumps.

 

What I Liked Most About It

Like the previous book in this series, The Consuming Fire is epic in scope. Scalzi has set up an interesting and believable future civilization and it’s filled with interesting people, some of them more lovable than others.

Though Scalzi typically avoids describing his characters’ physical appearances, here it seems he tested the waters a little. He used “mousy” to describe Emperox Grayland, for example, and differentiated between two Wu cousins by describing their haircuts and slight differences in stature. (Most characters are entirely undescribed.)

I was (almost a spoiler!) glad to learn a bit more about the rest of humanity. In the previous book I’d been led to believe that all or almost all humans were in the Interdependency and little or nothing was said about the times before that. In this book, we learn more about what’s been going on beyond the borders of this particular empire.

As is usual with Scalzi, the story is fun. His writing style is light. Both he and his characters tend to see the humor even in serious situations, which is something I appreciate.

Finally, very near the end, there’s a line that I enjoyed immensely. Kiva Lagos is considering whether she’s developed a crush on another character, and determines that it’s “a very not-Kiva thing to do, but on the other hand who gave a fuck if it was ‘not-Kiva’, because she wasn’t some fucking fictional character destined to do whatever some goddamn hack wanted her to do.” If I might toot my own horn a bit, this reminded me of the theme of my recent story Compelled, in which several characters wonder whether they’re slaves to the author’s whims. (Spoiler: they are.)

 

Conclusion

If you read and enjoyed The Collapsing Empire, you’ll like this one as well. I doubt it would stand well on its own, so I won’t recommend jumping into the series here.

Related: The Collapsing Empire

 

 

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