Charles Stross: A First Encounter
A number of my friends seem to like Charles Stross, and a couple of his novels came into the bookstore recently, so I gave them a go. Massive spoilers below.
The Merchant Princes
(Books one and two, The Family Trade and The Hidden Family)
These are the first two books in what is apparently an epic series: four novels published to date, at least two more titles planned. Behold the power of long-running sagas! I'm not sure whom to blame for this, really. I suspect either Frank Herbert or Roger Zelazny. On the other hand, I read all of the Amber books, the Belgariad, and about nine too many Xanth books, so what do I know?
Let's get this out of the way: this series is science fiction. Yes, I know Stross says it's fantasy. It has magic! Well, one kind of magic. One extremely narrow kind of magic. And it's heritable, and its heritability is demonstrably Mendelian as a recessive genetic trait. Stop me when this sounds too scientific to be fantasy, ok? I mean, really -- Star Wars has magic, too, but nobody † tries to position that as fantasy. Plus hey, midichlorons. They're scientific! 'Nuff said.
A reasonably common science-fiction setup is for the author to have some nifty technological or futurological idea, and play what-if. Larry Niven was footling around with Dyson spheres and bam, out came Ringworld -- that kind of thing. In the case of the "Merchant Princes" books, Stross's nifty idea isn't magic. Silly reader! The magic (about which more later) is not much more than a MacGuffin. No, the core idea about which Stross is writing this series is economics, specifically developmental economics and industrialization.
No, really.
There's a bunch of setup in the early chapters of The Family Trade that establish Our Heroine, Miriam, as a kick-ass investigative journalist on the high-tech circuit. She's just cracked a big story about how tech company stock transactions are being used to launder a whole lot of money, probably drug money, and since it's going to be big enough that the FBI and DEA and everybody will suddenly take a keen interest in her and her outfit, she goes to pitch it to her VP. She's fired on the spot on trumped-up charges, sneaks a copy of her data home, and discovers belatedly that of course her paper is owned by one of these firms acting as a laundry. Oops. She runs off to hide and regroup and go gonzo, and gets some sympathy from her wheelchair-bound adoptive mother, who finally after all these years gives her a box with her birth-mother's belongings. See, Miriam was a babe in arms, literally -- found along with her mother, who'd been killed by massive stab wounds and left. Mom wasn't carrying much, but at least there's this banged-up old locket. Inside isn't a cameo or photograph, though; it's a funny knotwork design that hurts to look at for more than a glance, and then...
Boom. Suddenly Miriam is sitting in her desk chair in the middle of the woods somewhere. Magic!
Miriam figures out pretty quickly what the magic is. There's this other world, see, and looking at the locket snaps her back and forth between that one and Earth (and gives her a massive headache). The other world seems to be exactly congruent with Earth, too: switch sides, walk ten feet, switch sides again, and she's the same ten feet from where she started over there. The other side isn't industrialized, though. It's medieval-agrarian and the inhabitants speak ... well, it isn't ever properly named (tsk tsk, Stross!), but it's what you'd get if Old Norse grew up as a major international language. See, on Earth2, the Vinland settlement survived. Whee, we're in an alternate-history novel! It turns out that Miriam is really Helge, the long-lost daughter of Priscilla, a member of the one extended family (the Clan) who possess the genetic ability to world-walk. They've known about it since the 1730s, and have been intermarrying carefully since then to retain the recessive trait while not turning into imbeciles. They've also been running drugs in our Earth, since that's extremely lucrative and totally safe: all you need to do is pick up a suitcase full of coke, cross to Earth2, and mosey on over to wherever you need to bring the junk back to Earth. Not much need to worry about bandits and so on; Earth2 is medieval and you can stock up on machine guns and the like in Earth1.
There's lots more after this, of course, but mostly it's either tactical (how do you manage building security when people can switch Earths?) or economic. Miriam explains multiple times to various Earth2 folks that back in the day people over on our side believed that all there was to commerce was moving goods from one place to another, but this chap named Adam Smith figured out that actually peoples' labor creates value, so this core dependency on trafficking in raw goods -- drugs, gold, whatever -- is not actually ideal, and then she starts talking about banking systems and so on, and... Whew! Oh, and then it turns out that a long-lost relative accidentally found a way to Earth3, which is sort of 1920s-era tech, but with airships instead of fixed-wing, and etheric vibrations instead of "radio waves," and France conquered Great Britain a couple of hundred years ago so the British royal family relocated to the New World and continued there, etc. They've got electricity and steam automobiles, so they're a much better potential sink for Earth1-inspired technological innovation, right? As long as you can get the patent situation under control; see above re economic development theory.
Okay, at this point you're either thinking "but... okay, this could be cool! Gaslight and DVD players and swordfighting all in the same book!" And you'd be right -- it could be cool. But there's enough about Stross's handling that I find myself not really inclined to read further in the series.
My gripe is that so much of the narrative is... perfunctory. It winds up having this sort of clunky potboiler feel underneath all the shiny worldbuilding. That worldbuilding is pretty slick: Stross has clearly done a lot of thinking about tech-transfer implications, finance, and so on, and also about the world-walking MacGuffin and how it affects various sorts of activities, but that should be par for the course. In human terms, though, the tumble of events and the way Miriam approaches them feels... unmotivated? Inappropriate, even? I mean, people are trying to kill her and she's on the run from Mafia who can essentially teleport into her house at will if they want, and a few pages later she's thinking some more about banking and Adam Smith? WTF? There are flashes of good material involving nasty family infighting among semi-nobility who essentially have been playing those games since birth, have been reared to play those games, but they're only flashes, and then we're off talking about asbestos brake pads again. The technical aspects of the story get all the love, leaving the personal aspects feeling patchy and incomplete. There are also multiple plot threads introduced in the first book that are conspicuously left dangling, including one major issue that goes unmentioned even in the second book. That gets old fast, IMO. It's these structural issues that are turning me off to the series. It's just too frustrating.
Update: oh yeah, I forgot to mention finding three typos in the first novel alone. "Vice" for "vise" is at least a spellcheck failure, but "Medelin" and "sollace" are inexcusable. WTF, Tor?
† Nobody important.