With wit, vigor and a winning humanism, science-fiction star John Scalzi (Old Man's War; Redshirts) wraps up his ambitious Interdependency trilogy on a sunny note. Rarely have mutinies, assassination plots and a civilization facing its own self-inflicted doom been rendered with such good cheer. Even the rampant swearing and sex talk is genial, but don't mistake Scalzi's comic brio for a lack of seriousness--this series is rich with contemporary resonance.
Scalzi's space opera pits an inexperienced, civic-minded leader, recently raised to the position of emperox, against the monopolistic merchant houses that mostly control the Interdependency, a millennia-old galactic empire. In The Last Emperox, "The Flow"--the interstellar pathways that have linked and enabled the survival of far-flung human settlements--is collapsing. The new emperox wants to find a way to save all of the Interdependency's soon-to-be-isolated citizens, while the merchant houses would prefer just to save their own elite families. Schemes, murders and triple-crosses ensue, all dramatized in classic Scalzi fashion, with lengthy, hilarious dialogue scenes better suited to the stage than the Hollywood blockbuster.
Scalzi loves a chatty two-hander, where pairs of characters (usually powerful women, in this series) quip and talk over each other, taking turns wielding the upper hand. He also loves love, and his romantic pairings here stir more warmth than you might expect in a book with gleaming spaceships on the cover. His mode, essentially, is the intergalactic Shakespearian comedy, right down to the wordplay, revelations of disguised identity and rousing belief in the power of speechmaking. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor