Tag: McRapey

An established author who wishes to remain anonymous became interested in Scalzi’s latest as a result of the various shenanigans surrounding it and sent me his review of the book for posting here. His opinion of it is modestly more positive than mine, but I post it here, unedited, for the record. I also sent him a copy of Corrosion, so it will be interesting to see his perspective on that if he happens to read and review it.

The Collapsing Empire started its career as a published book with a major disadvantage – it had a great deal of hype.  Depending on who you believe, The Collapsing Empire is either the greatest space opera since Dune and Foundation or a millstone around Tor Books’ collective neck.  John Scalzi, known for Old Man’s War and Redshirts, has the problem that his latest novel will be judged against the hype, instead of being judged on its own merits.  In writing this review, I have done my best to ignore both sides of the ongoing culture wars and judge the book by its own merits.  You can judge for yourself if I have succeeded.

In the far future, interstellar travel is only possible through the Flow – an alternate dimension that allows FTL travel between colonised star systems.  (The science explanation is highly dubious, but I wouldn’t hold that against anyone.)  Humanity is united by the Interdependency, a network of colonies that are (mostly) dependent on each other to survive, and ruled by the Houses, led by the ‘Emperox.’  Unfortunately for the inhabitants of this universe, the Flow is actually changing – it’s either shifting routes (what the bad guys believe) or collapsing completely (what the good guys fear).  Either way, humanity is going to be in for some pretty rough times.  The Interdependency is so interdependent that only one world is habitable without massive tech support.

This sounds like the basis for a great space opera.  Humanity can – humanity must – find a way to survive when the Flow vanishes and all of its scattered star systems suddenly find themselves on their own.  (The tech base described in the book should certainly be up to the task.)  A lone star system can work to survive when the Interdependency vanishes.  Or humanity can find a way to travel FTL without using the Flow, or find a way to bend the Flow to humanity’s will.  Or …

These don’t happen.  Maybe they will in the sequel (the book ends on a cliff-hanger) but they don’t in The Collapsing Empire.  Instead, we get a mixture of local politics, interstellar shipping concerns and interstellar politics.  Some of these blend seamlessly into the story line, others don’t quite make sense.  I think it’s fairly safe to say that the most exciting part of the story is the mutiny in the prologue, which honestly doesn’t make sense (the mutineers are taking a terrible risk) and is completely unnecessary.  I’m happy to enjoy a Game of Thrones-style story about mighty aristocracies battling for supremacy, but that wasn’t what I was promised when I downloaded this book.

The book flows well – I read it in an hour – but it was oddly choppy.  There are aspects that really needed an editor’s touch – the mutiny in the prologue stops long enough for the author to lecture us on his universe, which isn’t necessary as all the main points are covered in CH4 – and others that needed more consideration.  I had problems following the flow – hah – of time within the universe; we are told, on one hand, that it takes months to move from Hub to end, yet Marce leaves Hub (after a largely pointless escape sequence) and in the very next section he’s on Hub.

Cardenia Wu-Patrick is probably the most likable character in the story, although she takes pointless risks and is generally ill-prepared to assume the post of ‘Emperox.’  (Her aide quips that nice people don’t get power, which misses the point that Cardenia inherited her power – she didn’t earn it.)  Marce Claremont is young and overshadowed by his sister, who I felt would have made a more interesting POV character.  And Kiva Lagos is – put bluntly – a potty-mouthed bully and a sexual predator.  Her good aspects are overshadowed by her bad points.

I admit it – I cringed when I read the first section, where it is clear that Kiva has pulled a very junior member of her ship’s crew into sexual congress.  Consent is dubious at the very least – there isn’t even a sense that he’s using her as she’s using him.  And then, she comes on to Marce later in the book in a manner that, if she were a man, would be considered borderline rape.  To call her ‘problematic’ is to understate the case.  This might not be a problem if she was the villain – or the text even acknowledged the issues – but it does not.

There are other issues, deeper issues, that offend my inner critic.  On one hand, Count Claremont – the physicist who first realised that something was wrong with the Flow – makes snarky remarks about the lack of peer review, yet his own work has the same problem.  While this is acknowledged, it makes no sense.  Modern-day governments have no problem finding qualified scientists and putting them to work on secret government projects.  Why can’t the Interdependency do the same?  And on the other, the bad guys – who have also realised that there is something wrong with the Flow – have a plan to take advantage of the crisis, but don’t seem to realise the potential of their own technology.  It suggests, very strongly, that no one takes the crisis completely seriously.

And yet, it is made clear that the Flow has shifted before.  Humanity has lost contact with Earth – in the distant past – and a relatively small colony world in the more recent past – but this does not appear to alarm anyone.  Is Earth really that insignificant?  One may draw a comparison between the Flow’s slow collapse and global warming, but the loss of two entire worlds is a little more significant than anything we’ve seen on Earth.  I would have expected a serious effort to reduce the degree of interdependency since that disaster.  If nothing else, shipping foodstuffs and suchlike between star systems must be an economic nightmare.  (And the ‘lie’ that binds the Interdependency together is obvious from the setting.)

To be honest, the text tries to balance humour with story and fails.  The fact that there is a legal way to mutiny – which no one bothers to follow – make me smile and roll my eyes at the mixture of humour and absurdity.  There are moments of banter that are oddly misplaced or unintentionally ironic.  The ship names sound as though they have come out of Iain M. Banks – Kiva’s ship is called the ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ – but they have a very definite air of absurdity.  Banks made it work because the names suited the Culture – they don’t work so well in The Collapsing Empire.  And the very first line in the book is stolen directly from Scooby Doo.

In the end, The Collapsing Empire left me feeling oddly disappointed.  It’s shorter than I expected, given the price, and very little is resolved in the first book – the bad guys have taken a few blows, but the good guys haven’t even started to come to grips with the real problem.  I know that most books are set up as either trilogies or open-ended series these days, but there should be at least some resolution.  (If only because the second book might be delayed, increasing reader frustration.)  Off Armageddon Reef and The Final Empire, both also published by Tor, show how this can be done.

The Collapsing Empire is not the best SF novel of the decade, nor is it the worst.  It has high ideals and grand ambitions, but it doesn’t live up to them (nor the hype).  I probably won’t be picking up the sequel.

Now THIS is a proper negative review, of such quality that even the professional reviewer can only salute and applaud. An actual scientist provides the fake reviewers of Corrosion with an exemplary masterpiece of devastation in his review of John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire, which he took the innovative approach of actually reading in order to criticize it more effectively:

A Slipshod, Incompetent Disaster

I gave this book a fair shake. While I disagree with John Scalzi on sociopolitical issues, that doesn’t mean he can’t be a good, or even great author. After all, I disagree vehemently with Margaret Atwood and Stephen King, but I consider them brilliant scribes whose works I adore. Unfortunately, “The Collapsing Empire” is a mess so wretched that I can’t see how even Scalzi’s biggest fans can defend it.

A major problem is the lack of logical sense to the proceedings. This goes beyond mere plot holes, although there are no lack of those. For instance, the Prologue features a ship mutiny. One in which the ship’s chief engineer is murdered and there are plans to do the same with the captain and her supporters. Risky business, no? Not only do the mutineers face the prospect of armed resistance, putting their lives on the line, but they have committed a serious criminal act. Who is to say they won’t be found out by an investigator? Or one of the many fellow mutineers won’t blackmail them or squeal later on the others?

In other words, they need a damn compelling reason to mutiny. The one provided by Scalzi is that the executive officer leading the mutiny will receive a 30% premium on their weapons cargo by selling to the rebels of the planet instead of the government. Yes, you read that correctly. 30 percent, not 30 times.

This is absurdly stupid, the equivalent of burning down one’s house because one spotted a spider in the bathroom.

There are other problems with the mutiny. Inexplicably, the ship has all the weapons stored in one and only one cabinet in the entire ship. Which is conveniently taken over by the mutineers. This is of course preposterous, and shows again that Scalzi has no clue about the military science fiction he writes about.

Oh, and neither the captain nor any of her loyal officers is armed beyond a single futuristic weapon that works inside of three feet.

With the mutiny proceeding poorly, Scalzi interjects with some long exposition. In the middle of the tense life-and-death stand-off, we suddenly get multiple paragraphs explaining the pseudo-science behind “The Flow”. This completely shatters a reader’s immersion into the story, and is done so poorly a fan fiction writer would wince. Scalzi even breaks the fourth wall, explaining to us about how things function in “this universe”.

Moreover, this exposition exposes Scalzi as being as clueless about science as he is on military matters. Now, “The Flow” itself seems to be a rip-off of similar teleportation concepts from older, classic science fiction works like “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman. But whereas Haldeman has a degree in physics and astronomy and writes credibly on the topic, Scalzi, a philosophy major, is hopelessly lost.

He tries to mask this confusion with meaningless mumbo-jumbo. “Topographically complex” is not a term, but word salad to impress laypeople with. And just what the hell is “metacosmological structure”?! Hilariously, Scalzi then throws up his hands and admits defeat;

“And even that was a crap way of describing it, because human languages are crap at describing things more complex than assembling a tree house. The accurate way of describing the Flow involved the sort of high-order math probably only a couple hundred human beings across the billions of the Interdependency could understand, much less themselves use to describe it meaningfully. You likely would not be one of them.”

In that case, why not delete the previous section entirely? There are other absurd passages. For instance, the crew is told of the speed (a scalar) of Scalzi’s teleportation mumbo-jumbo, but not its direction (a vector) or its acceleration. A high school freshman taking physics for the first time would be embarrassed for the writer.

Now, while I’m a scientist for a living who enjoys hard science fiction, there is nothing wrong with a science fiction author having a poor grasp of science, provided he excels in other areas. Harry Harrison is a favorite of mine, and the less said about his understanding of physics and mathematics, the better. However, Harrison avoided this problem by very rarely bothering with these subjects at all. Scalzi, meanwhile, engages with them and looks like an absolute fool in the process.

Even when it comes to basic human interaction, the mutiny is a failure. In this tense, life-and-death situation, the characters react with…snark. Consider this exchange;


“Eva Fanochi probably could have answered that for you,” Gineos said. “If you hadn’t murdered her, that is.”


“Now’s not a great time for that discussion, Captain.”

This doesn’t exactly inspire a reader to care about what the hell ends up happening to the characters. After all, they themselves don’t. Oh, and the captain wins by a bluff that makes no sense. She says that if she dies, her hand on a control panel will “blow every airlock the ship has into the bubble”? Sounds convincing, but what is it supposed to mean? And why would the mutineers, all experienced crewmen, fall for it when it’s revealed to be absolute rubbish a moment later? Wouldn’t they know the ship and its capabilities?

The following chapters I read, while not as error-laden, are still inauthentic and boring, when they’re not vile and outrageous.

Other reviewers have noted the introduction to Kiva Lagos, a powerful noble who is busy either raping or sexually coercing a lowly male subordinate through her vastly superior rank. He begs her to stop. She doesn’t let him. Lagos also swears and insults others constantly. One might think she is a main villain, but instead Lagos is a primary protagonist. Scalzi even called her one of his favorite characters ever. Apparently, behavior that would be considered sickening and abhorrent even in an unrepentant male antagonist is considered admirable and empowering so long as the gender is switched to female.

Scalzi tries to write cool, even female cool (which is harder), but it comes off as sophomoric and laughable when it’s not vulgar and repulsive. We are also told that Lagos was pursuing (stalking?) this junior purser for six whole weeks. Men pursue women for that long, but women don’t. Once her mind is made up, a confident woman would express her feelings long before that, and the man would either reject or accept her. Add “sexual dynamics” to the list of subjects Scalzi is ignorant of.

We are told the “emperox” Cardenia has to marry a member of a merchant guild. Why is she compelled to do so, when she is the most powerful person in the universe? Surely, it’s lesser individuals and families that have to scheme and marry to accrue more power rather than the top potentate? I’m not saying there aren’t circumstances where doing so wouldn’t make sense. However, it has to be EXPLAINED. Instead, Scalzi, in murky fashion, notes it would be advantageous for dealing with the merchant guilds (why?), with nothing further.

Speaking of lack of explanations, that dovetails with the most startling weakness of the book. The complete and total lack of any description. We are told nothing, absolutely nothing about the physical characteristics of any character, including main protagonists Emperox Cardenia Wu-Patrick, Kiva Lagos, and Captain Gineos. Naturally, there is no description of any buildings, rooms, objects, or spaceships, either.

While I generally dislike voluminous, multi-page descriptions, favoring sparser brush strokes, one still expects SOMETHING. With nothing offered at all, these characters, and the story as a whole, become little more than an amorphous blob. It adds to the feeling that this is lazy, bad fan fiction…. Avoid this, even if you’re a die-hard Scalzi fan.

While the book review is borderline sadistic in its heartless attention to detail, it is certainly informative for prospective readers, particularly when one compares it with a negative “review” of similar length, which is chiefly notable for the fact that the reviewer is as unfamiliar with Isaac Asimov and Foundation as he is with Johan Kalsi and Corrosion.

Ceterum censeo Tor Books esse delendam