{"id":1685,"date":"2020-04-21T10:46:36","date_gmt":"2020-04-21T14:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=1685"},"modified":"2020-04-21T10:46:36","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T14:46:36","slug":"john-scalzis-interdependency-trilogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=1685","title":{"rendered":"John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just finished reading The Last Emperox<\/em>, the just-published final volume of John Scalzi\u2019s Interdependency trilogy. It\u2019s a fun, breezy read, though not deep. But it is definitely of interest allegorically, since its collapsing interstellar empire tracks the current decline and fall of the American empire. We have an autocratic government that basically serves the interests of a rapacious capitalist\/feudalist ruling class, of families that control all production and trade through the possession of rigidly enforced (both legally and technologically) patent monopolies, and engage in purely extractive activities. Beneath these corporate\/familial entities, the vast mass of the people have no influence or political power whatsoever — but they do seem to have a welfare state much better than anything we have in the US currently (the ruling class of the Interdependency, unlike our own rapacious elite, are aware that they are buying general stability by stopping short of absolute immiseration of the masses). In the trilogy, we mostly see vicious political infighting among the elite (including frequent bombings, poisonings, and other sorts of assassination techniques) against an overwhelming background of massive and unavoidable environmental and economic collapse. The Empire is ending, and eventually the entire ruling class is forced to become aware of this. The only remaining question is what can be salvaged from the wreckage. The prevailing attitude among the members of the wealthy elite \u2014 just like the prevailing attitude among members of our real-world 1% (or really, 0.1%) \u2014 is to save themselves, and let the masses be exterminated. But the series has an upbeat ending, and the forces of rapacity are defeated, and the masses are saved, through a veritable technological deus ex machina<\/em>, involving a unlikely confluence of a number of factors: benevolence among a tiny fraction of the ruling elite, combined with supercomputing and absolute surveillance technology, and a massive scientific effort that is able to detach itself from the usual corporate imperative of short-term financial profit. Scalzi\u2019s greatest accomplishment as a writer is that he really pulls this off \u2014 his upbeat conclusion doesn\u2019t seem forced or artificial, because of the skillfulness of his world building and his character creating. So the trilogy is a gratifying read. We don\u2019t reject the conclusion; we are nonetheless unavoidably aware of how unlikely such a conclusion is to our actual current situation of collapsing empire. There is hope, as Kafka said, only not for us. Scalzi provides us with a (semi-)utopian alternative, which is a laudable thing to do in these dark, depressing times. In a situation where it is still easier to imagine the end of the world rather than modest improvements to the world system, I will say that even from my own marxist perspective Scalzi\u2019s reformism is a welcome riposte to the ideology of \u201cthere is no alternative.\u201d At the same time, for all of the trilogy\u2019s gratifying conclusion, reading it reinforces my awareness that what happens in Scalzi\u2019s fictional universe has little chance of happening in our actual one, and that the most likely scenario is the one that is defeated in the novels: the 1% will save themselves, at the expense of nearly everybody else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just finished reading The Last Emperox, the just-published final volume of John Scalzi\u2019s Interdependency trilogy. It\u2019s a fun, breezy read, though not deep. But it is definitely of interest allegorically, since its collapsing interstellar empire tracks the current decline and fall of the American empire. We have an autocratic government that basically serves the … Continue reading “John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1686,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685\/revisions\/1686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}