The Last Emperox

The Last Emperox is a space opera novel by the American writer John Scalzi, published by Tor Books on 14 April 2020. It is the final volume of the Interdependency trilogy and a sequel to The Consuming Fire.

With the predicted collapse of the Flow streams now widely known, the systems of the empire understand that they will soon be stranded from one another. End has become critical because it is the only system in the Interdependency with a planet that can support life without a sealed habitat, which makes it the destination of everyone who can reach it. The disgraced House of Nohamapetan has taken control of End and blockaded its remaining incoming Flow stream, both to increase the power and profit of their house and to prevent an unsustainable surge of billions of refugees from reaching the planet. Further in, Grayland II is still trying to hold the empire together while its institutions and its noble houses pursue their own advantage, and the closing book settles the stand-off over the one system that can still be reached.

The trilogy is built around an empire whose viability depends on a single piece of physics, and the last book is largely taken up with the political scramble that follows when that physics turns out to be finite.