First novel of the Interdependency trilogy.
In the distant future, and cut off from our home planet of Earth, humans have scattered throughout space, mostly living in manmade habitats, but a few on actual planets. Why in habitats instead of on worlds? Because of the Flow. Because faster-than-light travel does not exist:
"The speed of light is not only a good idea, it's the law. You can't get to it; the closer you accelerate toward it, the more energy you need to keep going forward, and it's a horrible idea to go that fast anyway, since space is only mostly empty, and anything you collide with at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light is going to turn you fragile spaceship into explody chunks of metal. And it would still takes years, or decades, or centuries, for the wreckage of your spaceship to zoom past wherever it was you originally planned to go."
So instead there is the Flow, which is:
"...generally described to laypeople as the river of alternate space-time that makes faster-than-light travel across the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds . . . The Flow, accessible by 'shoals' created when the gravity of stars and planets interacts just right with the Flow, to allow ships to slip in and ride the current to another star.
[However] The Flow is not anything close to a river—it is a multi- dimensional brane-like metacosmological structure that intersects with local time-space in a topographically complex manner, influenced partially and chaotically but not primarily by gravity, in which the ships accessing it don't move in any traditional sense but merely take advantage of its vectoral nature, relative to local space-time, which, unbounded by our universe's laws regarding speed, velocity, and energy, give the appearance of faster-than-light travel to local observers.
And even that is a crap way of describing it..."
So that's the author's way of having reasonable travel times so he can tell a story about an empire of city states run by the great houses based on trade which makes for interdependency without which they cannot survive on their own.
So it's a system that has worked for a very long time. But all good things must come to an end, I guess. And that time has come for the Interdependency.
Some smart people have figured it out. As have some not quite so smart people. Unfortunately, the not quite so smart ones based their conclusions on faulty math. They think they have figured out where the new center of government is going to be and they are doing everything they can to make sure they are the one running things.
Meanwhile, the actual governmental hub, a bit slower to get it than the other group, figure out that the other group is working under wrong conclusions. But the governmental group, being in a phase of transition and being a bit slow to act, is being attacked by the other guys, who are using chaos and terrorism to gain the upper hand.
So that's the story. It pretty much ends with the government people telling the ambitious people that they are operating under mistaken conclusions. And that humankind still has to cooperate in order to survive the coming catastrophe of changing of the Flow.
This was a pretty good story, not as boring as a lot of these, what I would call political novels, as many of them are (to me). I found I wasn't skipping a lot of pages, I only did that a couple of times. Which says a lot as I have a habit of just glancing through text that is too descriptive, too gross, too talky or has depictions of battles. Battles, I only care about the outcome, not the action. So a pretty good story. Not good enough for me to follow up with the rest of the trilogy though. The second book is The Consuming Fire followed by The Last Emperox.
Here a review by Kirkus Reviews.
