There’s a reason so much fiction is about rich people: Rich characters are the ones who get to do things! They travel. They chat. They have time to reflect, and when they do, it isn’t always about super depressing stuff. While wealthy protagonists are the default in so-called literary fiction, genre writing frequently revolves around them, too: How many times has George R.R. Martin cut away from one of his interesting characters so a Lannister can worry about whether they’ll continue to have as much gold as they’ve become accustomed to?
Now that I think about it, “Game of Thrones in space” isn’t the worst way to introduce The Collapsing Empire, the latest from John Scalzi. It’s not the best, either—that description sells The Collapsing Empire short—but both stories are centered on powerful dynasties butting heads. The Collapsing Empire takes place in a future so distant that Earth is all but forgotten, where dynastic mercantile families rule their interstellar civilization, the Interdependency. Alas, the Interdependency is built on the Flow—“a multidimensional brane-like metacosmological structure” that enables travel between otherwise remote star systems—and the Flow is collapsing. “Over a long enough timescale everything shifts,” one character warns Cardenia, the newly crowned Emperox of the Interdependency. “We’re about to enter a period of shifts.”