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.

“Really nice people don’t usually accrue power.” “You’re saying I’m kind of an outlier,” Cardenia said. “I don’t recall saying you were nice,” Naffa replied.

It was overly plush in a manner that suggested that the residents had confused excess for elegance.

We look like a box of crayons, Cardenia thought.

“The survival of humanity was the point of the Interdependency!” Cardenia shouted, at the computer simulation of her father. And this is where, in her dream, both Attavio VI and Grayland I laughed in her face. “My child, that’s never been the point of the Interdependency,” Attavio VI said. “It’s just the excuse we gave for it,” Grayland I affirmed, nodding. “Then what is the point?” Cardenia asked, still shouting. “What is the Interdependency?”

“I worked in marketing,” Rachela I said. “Before I was a prophet. After, too, but we didn’t call it that after that point.”

How, in short, the Interdependency codified and manipulated humanity’s actual need for intersystem trade and cooperation, for the benefit of just a few at the very top. Starting

“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.”