SciFi Resurrection II: Robert Stross
In the search for new authors I’m often adrift upon a sea. Amazon’s comprehensive catalog is worse than being in a candy store; unlimited choices, limited purse. I follow up on recommendations by other readers but I’m usually disappointed. Robert Stross’s Neptune’s Brood was not one of them.
Neptune’s Brood is a sci-fi mystery thriller set in the far future after the extinction of human beings. Our civilization lives on thru the use of meta humans; robots endowed with all the memories and personality of human beings without all the problems associated with our physical limitations. It was a story structured on the innocent character being sucked into some interstellar conspiracy and treasure hunt. The story moves along at a brisk pace where the main character starts out to vacation to visit a sister and ends up taking down the evil financial empire controlled by her mother/matriarch/employer. Mr Stross creates a corporate feudal system that uses medieval financial instruments which are necessary due to the vast distances between the stars and planets. They rely on the physical possession of documents and crosschecks to move and transfer wealth. Our main character is a banker that finds clues to some long lost financial instrument that wasn’t fully executed and with compound interest is worth huge sums. She stumbles along meeting other fun people that join her in a chase across the stars that results in a standoff with the bad guy, a monolog and a happy ending.
It’s the puzzle mystery format set in a fictional world with fictional societies and cultural norms. The better authors twist a few elements in our society, like there was never a protestant reformation or the Chinese colonized North and South America from the west coast east and then build a storyline around it. The story gets wound backwards, forwards, or sideways in both time and space around all the universal elements of human nature; survival, procreation, greed, fear, love. The society created is always pretty interesting, some things are recognizable, others, not so much. It’s the blending of the familiar and the unfamiliar in a coherent narrative that captures my attention. Weave the texture thru the story as it develops. Each reader paints a different mental picture of the canvas as events unfold. Then throw in a good mystery or chase or treasure hunt and I’m looking to read something else by the same author.
Okay. What else has he written? Back into the swamp that is the Amazon catalog but this time armed with a map. I soon discovered that this author works in both areas of Scifi/Fantasy. I read an interview with the author and he explained that the smearing back and forth in the focus of his works was more to do with the publishing world and contract obligations rather than what the author wanted to write. He also pointed out that he observed that Sci-Fi tends to focus on a coming apart, uncharted change, confusion whereas Fantasy points towards reconciliation, order, and a cohesive whole. I’m not one for the whole fantasy storyline. The notion that absolute and incorruptible wisdom can be attained from a single event or personal experience is ridiculous. And sending some random barkeater on a grueling, endless quest equipped only with loyal comrades and a bag of magic jelly beans isn’t going to make it any better (I got about 100 pages into the Two Towers and just gave up). His description was more evidence that this was an author I should follow up on. I decided on a six book series called The Merchant Princes.
Classics like Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Iliad, even Tom Sawyer just drone on and on for hundreds of pages, more often than not leaving you stranded out on some fringe plot limb. I find it all rather tedious this literature oozing with sage advice. On the other hand something that’s well written, good plot, 3D characters, moves along, is too short at 600 pages. The multi book series lets you consume a really involved story in digestible chunks. You can stop after each volume having been told one sub story, beginning to end, or you can continue onto another portion of the story. Harry Potter used this model to great success. When you dive into one of these series there’s always a chance that the original plot conflict is never resolved. Worse is the situation when the original conflict is resolved for a while then it gets unresolved so the author gets another check (Spock is DEAD move on!).
The Merchant Princes revolved around a family that had the ability to travel between parallel universes via a genetic mutation and a visual cue pattern that triggered the ability. The main character is a 21st century, thirty something, career woman that runs across hard professional times and through a series of random and seemingly unrelated events, discovers that she has the ability to travel between parallel universes, Turns out that not only is she a world walker but she’s also royalty in the parallel world! Yes, the Mom and Dad were the bad seed in the tyranny of feudalism that ruled the parallel world. They were attacked by the establishment representatives and Mom escapes with the daughter to our world and raises her without the knowledge of her true identity, while Dad perishes in the fight to cover their escape. It’s a good plot line if the author can flesh it out with some good characters and science as was done in this case. Another advantage to the multi-book series is that we’re draw down a rabbit hole where there are many subplots and characters that have the room and time to develop. Here we see the path of discovery and personal conflict, the collapse of one timeline into another, the chaos and destruction that follows as worlds collide (Dramatic inflection).
Mr. Stross also works at the science. Jumping between worlds allows him to really have fun with the twists and variances of random moments in history. He does the world where it’s flat out feudalism; the guy with the best weapons and the most men rules, and then he does the one where we missed the Enlightenment creating a world of colonialism, imperial rule and a stunted industrial revolution. He also takes the time to tease us with a world where the weather and ecosystem is entirely different than the one we live in. I like the idea of a parallel universe that has an entirely different history for the solar system. Imagine a solar system where Mars is just large enough to maintain its liquid mantel and magnetic field; it keeps its atmosphere and liquid water. What of earth then? In the end, The Merchant Princes was a great read and will have three additional volumes coming out next year. I’m invested enough that I’ll be reading them.
Neptune’s Brood is a sci-fi mystery thriller set in the far future after the extinction of human beings. Our civilization lives on thru the use of meta humans; robots endowed with all the memories and personality of human beings without all the problems associated with our physical limitations. It was a story structured on the innocent character being sucked into some interstellar conspiracy and treasure hunt. The story moves along at a brisk pace where the main character starts out to vacation to visit a sister and ends up taking down the evil financial empire controlled by her mother/matriarch/employer. Mr Stross creates a corporate feudal system that uses medieval financial instruments which are necessary due to the vast distances between the stars and planets. They rely on the physical possession of documents and crosschecks to move and transfer wealth. Our main character is a banker that finds clues to some long lost financial instrument that wasn’t fully executed and with compound interest is worth huge sums. She stumbles along meeting other fun people that join her in a chase across the stars that results in a standoff with the bad guy, a monolog and a happy ending.
It’s the puzzle mystery format set in a fictional world with fictional societies and cultural norms. The better authors twist a few elements in our society, like there was never a protestant reformation or the Chinese colonized North and South America from the west coast east and then build a storyline around it. The story gets wound backwards, forwards, or sideways in both time and space around all the universal elements of human nature; survival, procreation, greed, fear, love. The society created is always pretty interesting, some things are recognizable, others, not so much. It’s the blending of the familiar and the unfamiliar in a coherent narrative that captures my attention. Weave the texture thru the story as it develops. Each reader paints a different mental picture of the canvas as events unfold. Then throw in a good mystery or chase or treasure hunt and I’m looking to read something else by the same author.
Okay. What else has he written? Back into the swamp that is the Amazon catalog but this time armed with a map. I soon discovered that this author works in both areas of Scifi/Fantasy. I read an interview with the author and he explained that the smearing back and forth in the focus of his works was more to do with the publishing world and contract obligations rather than what the author wanted to write. He also pointed out that he observed that Sci-Fi tends to focus on a coming apart, uncharted change, confusion whereas Fantasy points towards reconciliation, order, and a cohesive whole. I’m not one for the whole fantasy storyline. The notion that absolute and incorruptible wisdom can be attained from a single event or personal experience is ridiculous. And sending some random barkeater on a grueling, endless quest equipped only with loyal comrades and a bag of magic jelly beans isn’t going to make it any better (I got about 100 pages into the Two Towers and just gave up). His description was more evidence that this was an author I should follow up on. I decided on a six book series called The Merchant Princes.
Classics like Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Iliad, even Tom Sawyer just drone on and on for hundreds of pages, more often than not leaving you stranded out on some fringe plot limb. I find it all rather tedious this literature oozing with sage advice. On the other hand something that’s well written, good plot, 3D characters, moves along, is too short at 600 pages. The multi book series lets you consume a really involved story in digestible chunks. You can stop after each volume having been told one sub story, beginning to end, or you can continue onto another portion of the story. Harry Potter used this model to great success. When you dive into one of these series there’s always a chance that the original plot conflict is never resolved. Worse is the situation when the original conflict is resolved for a while then it gets unresolved so the author gets another check (Spock is DEAD move on!).
The Merchant Princes revolved around a family that had the ability to travel between parallel universes via a genetic mutation and a visual cue pattern that triggered the ability. The main character is a 21st century, thirty something, career woman that runs across hard professional times and through a series of random and seemingly unrelated events, discovers that she has the ability to travel between parallel universes, Turns out that not only is she a world walker but she’s also royalty in the parallel world! Yes, the Mom and Dad were the bad seed in the tyranny of feudalism that ruled the parallel world. They were attacked by the establishment representatives and Mom escapes with the daughter to our world and raises her without the knowledge of her true identity, while Dad perishes in the fight to cover their escape. It’s a good plot line if the author can flesh it out with some good characters and science as was done in this case. Another advantage to the multi-book series is that we’re draw down a rabbit hole where there are many subplots and characters that have the room and time to develop. Here we see the path of discovery and personal conflict, the collapse of one timeline into another, the chaos and destruction that follows as worlds collide (Dramatic inflection).
Mr. Stross also works at the science. Jumping between worlds allows him to really have fun with the twists and variances of random moments in history. He does the world where it’s flat out feudalism; the guy with the best weapons and the most men rules, and then he does the one where we missed the Enlightenment creating a world of colonialism, imperial rule and a stunted industrial revolution. He also takes the time to tease us with a world where the weather and ecosystem is entirely different than the one we live in. I like the idea of a parallel universe that has an entirely different history for the solar system. Imagine a solar system where Mars is just large enough to maintain its liquid mantel and magnetic field; it keeps its atmosphere and liquid water. What of earth then? In the end, The Merchant Princes was a great read and will have three additional volumes coming out next year. I’m invested enough that I’ll be reading them.