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Charles Stross

The Merchants' War (Merchant Princes) Mass Market Paperback – 6 Dec. 2008

by Charles Stross (Author)

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Miriam Beckstein is a young, hip, business journalist in Boston. She discovered in The Family Trade and The Hidden Family that her family came from an alternate reality, that she was very well-connected, and that her family was too much like the mafia for comfort. She found herself caught in a family trap in The Clan Corporate and betrothed to a brain-damaged prince, and then all hell broke loose.Now, in "The Merchants' War", Miriam has escaped to yet another world and remains in hiding from both the Clan and their opponents. There is a nasty war going on in the Gruinmarkt world of the Clan, and we know something that Miriam does not; something that she's really going to hate-if she lives long enough to find out.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Tor Books
Publication date

6 Dec. 2008
Dimensions

10.64 x 2.6 x 16.82 cm
ISBN-10

9780765355898
ISBN-13

978-0765355898
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Product description

Review

"For sheer inventiveness and energy, this cliffhanger-riddled serial remains difficult to top." --Publishers Weekly

"The world-building in this series is simply superb, in other words it is engaging, crystal-clear and disturbingly real..... The Merchants' War is fast-paced and engrossing and will leave readers ravenous for the next installment." --SciFi.com

"Charlie Stross' latest is a brilliant, amusing, and challenging piece of mestizo fiction -- recklessly cross-breeding fantasy and SF tropes, and using the resulting bonfire to say interesting things about culture, economics, politics, and really cool battles with chain-mail and MP5's and horses and hang-gliders. Very real people with very different backgrounds meet and collide and strike lovely sparks. This series is great and getting better all the time!" --S.M. Stirling

"The action shifts rapidly among the three worlds in the fourth successive thriller in a fantastically thrilling series." --Booklist

About the Author

Charles Stross is the author of the bestselling Merchant Princes series, the Laundry series, and several stand-alone novels including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn's Children. Born in Leeds, England, in 1964, Stross studied in London and Bradford, earning degrees in pharmacy and computer science. Over the next decade and a half he worked as a pharmacist, a technical writer, a software engineer, and eventually as a prolific journalist covering the IT industry. His short fiction began attracting wide attention in the late 1990s; his first novel, Singularity Sky, appeared in 2003. He has subsequently won the Hugo Award twice. He lives with his wife in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a flat that is slightly older than the state of Texas.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0765355892
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books; Reprint edition (6 Dec. 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780765355898
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0765355898
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 10.64 x 2.6 x 16.82 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 1,326,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 20,909 in Epic Fantasy (Books)

Customer reviews:
53 ratings

About the author

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Charles Stross

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Charles Stross, 50, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005, 2010, and 2015 Hugo awards for best novella, Stross's works have been translated into over twelve languages.

Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped-catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst).

Customer reviews

5 star		34%
4 star		41%
3 star		15%
2 star		7%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

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Kindle Customer

An improvement

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 February 2008

Verified Purchase

I liked this book better than the last in the series. Now that we're on book 4, some of the books will stand out more than others. All of them have been highly enjoyable, but this one was definitely one of the better.

Miriam was able to escape marriage to the "Idiot". In New Britain she was compelled to seek help from the Movement. Erasmus Burgeson becomes her nurse-maid until such time as she is able to contact the right people back on Niewjim. In the old world the new king is planning to exterminate the Family. Back in Miriam's original world (ours) plans are laid to discover just how the gene works. Then the Family will be destroyed. People from Miriam's family are testing patterns in order to find new and more amenable worlds.

Everyone seems to be after everyone else in this book, while Miriam is on the run. Things are getting a bit more complicated and there is definitely another book on the way. I look forward to making its acquaintance.

Helpful

Martin Belderson

Oh dear, he's done it again

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 February 2009

Verified Purchase

I hate marking a book down but the author's cynical use of of yet another cliff-hanger ending deserve the low rating.

If alternate history writers like Harry Turtledove can write satisfactory endings into books in long-running series then a similarly able writer like Charles Stross could easily do the same.

I'd recommend that you not buy this book until the next one is in print. And that holds true for Books One to Three. You'll have to buy them all or else your reading experience will be highly unsatisfactory. Such a shame to manipulate readers - the one's who generate the writer's royalties - in this way.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

pherman

Treason and Plots.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 January 2013

Verified Purchase

After reading the first three books in the series I looked forward to this one.I was not disappointed,the action is fast and furious spread over the three parallel worlds.I do not think I am giving too much of the plot away by telling you there are more worlds to come.The plot thickens.I can heartily recommend this series'

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 February 2018

Verified Purchase

Excellent, very political and historically interesting. Parelel universe classic!

Helpful

GerryS WL

Good read - but incomplete

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 January 2008

Verified Purchase

I like Stross and bought this book because it was the next in sequence about Miriam & her other world family. Unfortunately, I am frustrated because this (like the previous 3rd novel) is just a segment of a larger novel and one could get a feeling of being strung along for financial reasons.

As said by others, this book leaves you in the middle of a battle. Good writing, good characters, but not a book on its own. Wait for the compilation.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

The merchants' war

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 May 2014

If someone has keenly followed Miriam's adventures they will probably enjoy this book of travel between alternate worlds more than I did. The series is one long story with no real conclusions, just continuations.

In this episode various characters have to fight for their lives in one or other of the two alternate worlds, though our modern US military has somehow managed to get there as well, and an atomic bomb is being sought in today's America. This makes for a confusing situation which appears to be contrary to the original premise that world-walkers came from a certain bloodline.

We open with a devastated palace where a bomb and fire have killed many people who were hoping to celebrate a wedding. Plotters want to take over the throne and can do this by killing their own family members. Miriam, a journalist from our time, has managed to escape being wed to a family member and runs off, promptly world-walking her way into trouble. Meanwhile a patrol of today's soldiers encounters both deadly fire and steel man-traps in the undergrowth.

The trouble, I think, is that a new reader will have no knowledge of what is going on, so several different people each have to tell someone else what has happened up to then, but in all this scramble, we are left without any emotional connection. So someone is killed - should I care? Whose side was he on, and which is the good side? Is there a good side? Who is Miriam and why am I supposed to like her? I had read the earlier books a few months previously and during this book I felt no sympathy for any character so halfway I stopped being concerned about the outcome. It was all just fighting.

I suggest that maybe reading the books back to back is the way to do it, to sustain connection with the story and characters.

Helpful

Colin Forbes

Best in the series so far

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 May 2010

Probably my favourite volume of this series so far. The pace of the story-telling is just right and kept me turning the pages compulsively, right into a major cliffhanger!

In previous books, I've found it a little hard to follow the political intrigue amongst the Clan factions, and it had been 18 months since I read the third book so I was slightly apprehensive about picking the story up again. However, with just a little re-capping I found the story easy to get in to.

While moving Miriam's story forward (a little) Charles Stross has brought a few new elements to the broader plot and I'm looking forward to seeing how things go in the next book. There's even a hint of science fictional elements to come (won't say any more than that!) but then travelling between parallel earths is the central theme of the books, so perhaps that's not really so new after all?

As mentioned in almost every review here, this is very much one part of a series - you must read the first three books before tackling this one and be aware that there are two more to follow!

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The Merchants' War (Merchant Princes) Mass Market Paperback – 6 Dec. 2008

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About the author

Charles Stross

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