The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency, #1)

by John Scalzi

And even that was a crap way of describing it, because human languages are crap at describing things more complex than assembling a tree house.

Then Rennered had to go get himself killed while racing, slamming himself and his charmingly retro automobile into a wall during a charity exhibition race with actual race car drivers and basically decapitating himself in the process. Cardenia never watched the video of the crash—that was her brother, why would she—but she read the forensics report afterward, which while clearing the event of any suspicion of foul play, noted the safety features of the automobile and the unlikelihood of the accident being fatal, much less one that ended in decapitation. Cardenia later learned that at the charity auction after the race Rennered was supposed to have publicly announced his engagement to Nadashe Nohamapetan. The confluence of those two events stayed firmly connected in her mind afterward.

We lost contact with the Earth over a thousand years ago when the single Flow stream to it disappeared.”

Even without the Interdependency, being interdependent was the best way for humanity to survive.

“I’m continually confronted with the human tendency to ignore or deny facts until the last possible instant. And then for several days after that, too.”

“That’s the human brain,” Attavio VI said. “It creates patterns when there aren’t any. Imagines causality when there is none. Imagines a narrative where none exists. It’s in the design of the brain itself. It’s primed to lie.” “And primed to believe the lie.”