Yet, even as the second and third installments have increasingly reflected the last few years’ mounting panic and renewed need for change, what is most compelling about the Interdependency, and what has been there from the start, is the core trio. Scalzi swears that, when he pitched this series in 2014, he could in no way anticipate how relevant it would feel to the current moment. Cardenia Wu-Patrick), scientist Marce Claremont, and guild merchant Kiva Lagos to convince the Interdependency to get past their denial to acknowledge the threat and figure out how to reform their entire culture… all while fending off aspiring emperox Nadashe and the rest of her Lannister-esque Nohamapetan family. But when the Flow threatens to disappear and isolate these systems from one another, it’s up to Emperox Grayland II (a.k.a. The space opera series, set 1,500 years in the future and far from Earth, takes place within an Interdependency of planetary systems linked by the extradimensional, river-like Flow.

The publication of John Scalzi’s The Last Emperox doesn’t just conclude the Interdependency series (which began with 2017’s The Collapsing Empire and continued with 2018’s The Consuming Fire), it also marks the completion of the first trilogy of the landmark deal that Scalzi signed with Tor Books in 2015: 13 books over a decade, for $3.4 million (a fourth novel, Head On, has also been published since the deal was struck).

The interdependency john scalzi