Over at Ars Technica, Annalee Newitz has an interesting review of John Scalzi's latest novel, The Collapsing Empire:
In his new novel The Collapsing Empire, bestselling writer John Scalzi builds a fascinating new interstellar civilization in order to destroy it. The Interdependency is a thousand-year-old interplanetary trade partnership in humanity's distant future. Its member planets were once connected to Earth by the Flow, a natural feature of space-time that allows ships to enter a kind of subspace zone. Once there, they can circumvent the unbreakable speed of light to travel between stars that are dozens of light years apart. What could go wrong?
Unfortunately, nobody is asking that question. Humanity has created an entire civilization that relies on the Flow and its "shoals," where ships can enter and exit. Planets are colonized purely based on their proximity to the shoals, not on habitability. The result is not unlike a medieval trade guild society whose populace happens to live in domed cities, buried caves, and artificial habitats, completely dependent on trade for resources.
The problem is that the Flow, like most natural features, has a tendency to change shape over time. As the novel opens, our protagonist, Cardenia, recently crowned emperox of the Interdependency, has just made a nasty discovery. She learns that her late father has secretly been funding a Flow physicist who has determined that every planet in the Interdependency will be cut off from the Flow within the next decade.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2017, @09:00PM
Hey grandma, times change. Hate to break it to you.