The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, #3)

by John Scalzi

“The fact you are trying to reduce a civil war to ‘she started it’ does not fill me with confidence,”

“Let’s be clear about what’s going on,” Deran Wu said. “It’s the end of civilization as we know it. And it’s going to be great for business.”

Either she was going to have to become less fundamentally selfish, or she was going to have to find a way to make others less so.

The second reason was that the ruling class of the Interdependency, favoring financial and social stability over having the lumpenproletariat trying to rip their heads from their necks at every opportunity, opted to have the Interdependency’s baseline standard of living one where no one starved, or was without shelter, or died of easily preventable diseases or went bankrupt if they had a heart attack or lost a job, or both.

They both came away from the meeting feeling like they had manipulated the other precisely, which meant it was a good meeting.

“Sophistry can be heuristically generated.” “So millennia of college sophomores have taught us, yes.”