The Collapsing Empire

The premise concerns a network rather than a single world. Human settlements in the setting are connected by routes through space, and the empire's economy and politics rest on the assumption that those routes are permanent. The novel's plot begins when that assumption stops holding, which turns a problem of physics into a problem of government. The Interdependency is a thousand-year-old empire of forty-eight star systems joined by the Flow, a network of one-way streams with fixed entry and exit points, and its capital is Hub.

Scalzi writes short novels with a contemporary voice, and the series is organised around the political rather than the technical side of the collapse, which is why the book is often described as a study of institutions under pressure. The first book appeared in March 2017, and the sequence continued with The Consuming Fire in 2018 and The Last Emperox in 2020. Because nothing travels faster than the Flow, the collapse of a stream is a severance rather than an inconvenience, which is why the politics of the empire matter more than its technology.