The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency, #2)

by John Scalzi

“Well, fuck,” he said.

Scalzi really likes putting profanity in his characters mouths. Hey, better than fart jokes.

Rachela’s prophecies did not ask people to change the way they lived, in the small-bore, everyday sense. It just asked them to swap out their system of governance, so that those at the very very top could have even more power, control and money than they had before. As it turned out, this was not too much to ask.

Seems quite plausible, sadly.

Up.

Upeksha, "Up" 😋

Priests, ministers, rabbis, imams and other religious leaders were on one hand delighted to be useful in a moment of spiritual and existential crisis and on the other hand well aware that this was the theological equivalent of shoppers making a panic run at the market, with their new parishioners grabbing at anything and hoping it would get them through.

The ship was indeed “warm,” but that warm was only relative to the space around it. Except for one arc of its ring, the ship registered a temperature of a couple of degrees above zero, Celsius.

Zero Celsius is, I think, *very* warm.

“He says the last ship arrived three hundred years ago, and its crew stayed here.

Prediction: these folks are from Earth, or at least some other remnant of humanity — not from the Interdependency. The Flow doesn't just connect the planets of this book, but many Flows exist and a different one connected this place, possibly back to the lost Earth.

“What Gitsen found was a genetic component that doesn’t conform to the historical genetic makeup of the Dalasýslans, and doesn’t much align with the DNA of people from the Interdependency.”