Just as good as the first, maybe better?

I was not disappointed by this sequel. P.S. writing this on my phone.

I don’t actually have much to say about the book. I enjoyed it a lot, and I was worried that I would have forgotten everything that happened in the last book, and I sort of had, but Scalzi makes it easy for you to catch up. Cardenia is still emperox, Kiva is still a profane little firecracker, Marse is traveling around giving lectures about the flow collapse, and the effing Nohamapetans are still messing everything up like the galactic class assholes they are.

They are all trying to prepare for the inevitable collapse of The Flow, which people are still hardcore resisting, despite a plethora of scientific data (cough cough). Cardenia is also dealing with the fallout from her decision to be only the second prophet emperox, in an attempt to get more people on board with preparing for the collapse. Like the first book when she was dealing with the idea that the foundation of the Interdependency was a lie, here she has to deal with consciously replicating that same decision in order to basically “save the galaxy” or whatever.

There’s a bunch of political maneuvering and some surprising twists and turns. I’m not sure what I was expecting from this book but it wasn’t what happened. I’m not sure where he’s going with it, either, which is really nice.

I continue to enjoy Wil Wheaton’s audio book narration, especially his Kiva, who is a little shit, but I love her.