Care to elaborate? (I mean, apart from the swearing, which is pretty great. You've described Kiva Lagos, one of protagonists, as your favorite character you've ever written. Please, historians, don't tell me all the things I'm getting wrong about the European age of exploration! I know. So there was no one particular empire in our past I was borrowing from, but rather, a whole historical gestalt, and then only loosely. We're so used to having at least some mechanical control of our travel that it's hard to put oneself back into a mindset where travel took months, not hours, and was not always a safe and predictable thing. In fact I did think very generally about the "golden age" of European exploration, roughly corresponding to the 15th through 17th centuries, in the sense that the empires that rose out of that era were wholly dependent on natural forces (wind, ocean currents, rivers) to move their ships and shape their destinies with regard to trade and exploration. You've said that the book - and its title - aren't a reference to any kind of current events in the U.S., but as I read it I kept thinking there had to be some kind of historical parallel, some great empire that fell when its trade routes failed or its ports silted up. There's certainly a fan impulse to tie everything together - fans of mine have tied together The Android's Dream, Fuzzy Nation and the Old Man's War universe - but canonically, they're separate and going to stay that way." But I like to keep my universes focused on what they're doing. "This isn't a complaint of crossovers, I should note: It's fun to cross Doctor Who and Star Trek (or whatever). "Nor any planned, since I'm not a comic book company doing crossovers of, say, Doctor Who and Star Trek," he says. Scalzi is a prolific author, with dozens of novels, novellas and nonfiction works to his name - but he tells me an email interview that The Collapsing Empire kicks off an entirely new universe for him, with no links to his other work.
So what's an emperox to do? (Yes, emperox - it's Scalzi's space-tacular gender-neutral term for the Interdependency's ruler.) And in the Interdependency, no planet can survive without supplies from the others.
But the Flow is failing, changing, fluctuating - cutting off some planets forever (including Earth). The Interdependency sprawls across light-years of space, held together by a strange dimension called the Flow, which enables humans to span the immense distances between planets. John Scalzi's novel The Collapsing Empire kicks off a new series set in - you guessed it - an interstellar empire teetering on the brink of collapse.
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