The Revolution Trade: A Merchant Princes Omnibus: The Revolution Business & The Trade of Queens

The Revolution Trade: A Merchant Princes Omnibus (Paperback) by Charles StrossHokay... I finally finished this series. And it was a slog, make no mistake about it. I'm not going to get into plot, and subplot twists and turns. But I will say that the author stumbles to a mostly unhappy ending here. Charles Stross doesn't pull any punches, instead he assaults you with full on body blows, kidney punches and jabs you in the throat.He also makes known his opinion of the US government, and it's actions during the Bush-Cheney administration. Yes, really. I think that is a large part of why the ratings, and reviews are all over the spectrum. The author mixed his SciFi, and Fantasy, with a bit too much of a projected reality. Or, maybe, (and this is again, just my own personal opinion) I prefer my SciFi and Fantasy to not be an "Alternate History" of this world.At any rate, the entire series lurches thru three different worlds, and none of them have much to commend. Instead the sins of ourselves seem to be ever present, in any world, and therefore all we have are some very gloomy prospects, wherever we go.

This is an exciting book with all the details: the different cultures of different eras brilliantly displayed in depth. The human beings are interesting and well drawn, and the politics and economics in the background are thoroughly worked out, with one exception. Stross thinks that the carpenter's labour that turns a lump of wood into a table is what adds value. This is backwards. It is because a table has more value than the lump of wood that the carpenter puts in the labour. The labour does not produce the value, the value produces the labour. The value derives from people wanting tables more than lumps of wood.It doesn't matter how hard you work to produce a ton of poo sandwiches, their value is zero or less because nobody wants them.This is the blunder Marx made, and it's mildly irritating to see it perpetuated by Stross.This is nit-picking, and it says a lot for the author's grasp of politics and history that this is the only flaw I can find. 😎

The main characters were tantalizingly close to focus but never quite made it, and the rest were hard to recognize. I spent time struggling to identify with who and why and where they were, eventually giving up and just reading one page at a time until the end. I saw just enough of Stross's delightful sense of humor to wish for more, and I was deeply gratified to see Dick Cheney get what he's so richly deserved all these years, with Donnie Rumsfeld and Tricky "I'm not a crook" Dick Nixon getting some of the same. Hmm, just noticed 2 of these guys are real Dicks. Maybe Don was just a nickname, because I'm sure he was a real Dick too. Finally, Stross's message couldn't have been more clear. Thanks for that too, Charles. Next time (I already bought the book) please bring more to the party for your characters, don't invite so many, and make the directions more uh, uh, better..

I've been reading Stross stories, novels, and website for some years now, and so when he announced that the Merchant Princes were being remade and re-released in the colonies, I jumped to get them and tore through the Kindle books quickly. Of the whole series I can say: I really like and am worried for the main characters, and am not entirely pleased with the direction of the plot.In this third book (or fifth and sixth if you like) quite a lot happens as a culmination of the characters and events set in motion earlier. Some of it is horrible, some merely strains the suspension of disbelief, but I think the twinges I get from the parts that ring too close to current events and, er, the family business, make me uncomfortable.It's all intentional on the part of the author for political and plot reasons, and I'm volunteering for it, but it does reduce my enthusiasm slightly in encouraging others to read the series ... even as much as I do want you to so we can talk about the conspiracies, events, and collectively await the new books next year.

The first two books were good. Decent premise and execution. But this third book is a smelly dog byproduct. He introduces gratuitous real world politics in some psychotic liberal wet dream about Cheney/Rumsfelt carpet bombing with nuclear weapons. He must have realized what a pile of excrement he had written because then then killed off most of the main characters and left the others hanging out to dry. I would recommend this book to the lunatic left fringe, but for the rest of us, stay away.

No real twists or turns in this one. It pretty much follows the path from the other texts in exploring the story. Even worse, by the time you get to the end, you are not really sure which side should be the villain as they all seem to have their issues. The writing is good, the action moves well, and I'd recommend it for a fun read as light science fiction.

The pieces sown in the first two volumes bear fruit in the conclusion to the story of Miriam Beckwith and her long-lost family. As an example, Mike is casually mentioned as an old boyfriend who happens to be a DEA agent. Science fiction, not fantasy, at its best.And, while there are sub-plots not resolved, which will form the basis of the new trilogy(?) to be published by TOR starting sometime this year(?), they do not materially affect this story. Miriam is not planned to be the main character. But we do know that Miriam had a baby girl, again a casual reference. I expected to see her sometime in the original series. Look for her in the new series. I could go on but Charlie (and yes, I do know him) has wove a beautiful tapestry which was wonderful in reading the books and wondering which things which seemed random and immaterial would blossom.In short: buy and enjoy the story.

It's a shame when a writer you've enjoyed produces a clunker like the "Merchant Princes" series. With this third volume it's clear why the original UK publisher abandoned the original six-book version half way through.The whole thing suffers from being more intellectual exercise than passion project, and in this last volume the cracks have really begun to show.The first half of "The Revolution Trade" was originally the fifth of six books, and seems to be a single-handed attempt to redefine the idea of "longeur". It crawls like a glacier with no sense of purpose beyond a blind impulse to grind your soul to dust.The story is spread across three or possibly four grimly pedestrian, parallel versions of North America with a cast of characters as dull as they are unsympathetic.In the vaguely steampunk Victorian setting a workers revolution unfolds in drab detail, with a gnawing sense of dread as a Nazi-like political party s-l-o-w-l-y emerges, but serves no obvious purpose beyond driving up word-count. It's a narrative dead-end, completely isolated from the main plot that affects none of the main characters or their interests.In the notional "real" world and its cod-medieval twin the meandering cross-world dynastic conflict set up in parts one and two rolls on with no more chance of a satisfactory conclusion as any soap opera. Alliances and double-crosses operate according to a playground-game logic and code of honour, with characters swearing fealty like children joining a new gang.A bolt-on denouement is constructed pretty much from whole cloth across mainly the second half of this book. An American intelligence agency appears from nowhere and rapid-prototypes unlikely deus ex machina technology. A faction emerges from the medieval world with a mission to cap off sub-plots and clear a path to the finale by culling the numerous but under-developed supporting cast.It's no secret that the series was a deliberate grab at the lucrative disposable-epic-fantasy market. Sadly with with each book the written-for-hire quality and the writer's detachment from the sub-genre becomes more clear. Nowhere is this more obvious than the late-arriving author-voice infodumps bombed in either to clarify or invent events and actions not properly fitted into the story so far.There's something of a myth that this is a restored original vision of a trilogy cut up into six parts by Charles Stross's US publisher. In fact the three book version reads like a fix-up of six. All three revised volumes have an obvious stop-and-restart half way. None is quite as obvious as the break-point in this third part, though, in which a sudden death cliff-hanger has a swift clunky ret-con into an A-Team style walk-away.As I've said before:Pfffffff ...

The third and final installment of the original Merchant Princes series.The story gathers pace and rushes to an end. Tensions are escalating, plots are weaving to their ends.This installment was originally published separately as The Revolution Business & The Trade Of Queens.(A new trilogy that follows on nearly 20 years later after the events of this book is in the works. Book 1, Empire Games - is released in January 2017.)

Desperate times, desperate measures & even more desperate people. Not to mention more than a few despicable antagonists, only some of whom are overcome. Much like life.

This was an 'I've started so I'll finish ' book. An imaginative and promising start got bogged down with political ranting and the obsessions with gun and nuclear technology.

Yet more Fun.