The Consuming Fire

The Consuming Fire is a space opera novel by the American writer John Scalzi, published by Tor Books in 2018. It is the middle volume of the Interdependency trilogy and a sequel to The Collapsing Empire.

The Interdependency is an interstellar empire that has never been able to hold itself together without the Flow, the conduit its ships use to travel between systems, and the Flow is now failing. Following the events of the first book, the system of End has been isolated from Hub by the breakdown of a Flow shoal. Grayland II, also known as Cardenia Wu-Patrick, heads both the empire and the Church of the Interdependency, and she uses the second of those positions to announce that she has had visions confirming the need to plan for the collapse. The claim unsettles the church and gives the House of Nohamapetan and other interests a political opening, so the work of preparing the empire for the end of the Flow has to be carried on while the empire's own institutions work against it.

Scalzi's trilogy is built on the premise that no world in the empire can stand on its own, and the second volume is where the practical consequences of that premise begin to be worked out. The third book, The Last Emperox, followed in 2020.