Social Distancing Reads #5: The Last Emperox by John Scalzi

Hello everybody – hope you are all keeping safe. I am lucky enough to be exclusively working from home and as I do so, I am trying to create a mental health routine of comfort reading, writing, going for (safe) walks and TV watching. Since I have read over 30 books so far this year, I will start posting about my recommended Social Distancing Reads more frequently as a way to catch up and keep up.

Times being what they are, The Last Emperox was a salve for my ailments, the perfect ending to this fantastic trilogy by John Scalzi. Also, thank the fucking gods for Kiva fucking Lagos. What a delight, what a pleasure, what a tremendous privilege to follow this character and see where she got to go. And how.

The how is of course part of the storyline of The Last Emperox, the series ender to end all series, concluding a story that took us through multiple twists around the Interdependency as we followed a new Emperox – Grayland II – take her mantle at the wrong fucking time, or rather perhaps, at the precisely right time. Because only a good person could effectively handle the problem that was presented to her right at the beginning: what makes all these colonies interconnected was coming to an end, with the imminent collapse of the Flow system and the ensuing potential collapse of civilization and death of billions.

Things being what they are, now and in the book, it feels eerily prescient for Scalzi to be writing about the collapse of what can be felt as “normal” with the rich nefariously getting together to become richer and not giving a damn fuck about the lives of regular, “expendable” people.

So here we follow our heroes and heroines doing their absolute best to save others, while the Machiavellian villains do their absolute worst to fuck everybody. And not in a good way, as Kiva fucking Lagos would say.

The plot twists are many (and GASPABLE) but really the character development here is what makes the book – and my heart – sing. These are admittedly fewer words than what the book, the characters and the series deserve, but things being what they are, it is the best I can do right now.

I just urge you to go and read this whole series.