Rising Sun

I've fallen out of the habit of reviewing entries in Charles Stross's "Merchant Princes" series on this blog. I enjoy them a lot, but between being relatively breezy reads and inevitably ending in cliffhangers they're a bit hard to review. That said, I think I've now completed the entire series: "Invisible Sun" just came out, and for once I'm basically caught up to the series.

 

MEGA SPOILERS

This series started in the early 2000s, with the first book set in 2002 and published in 2004. The gap between the in-series year and the real year continued to grow with each subsequent entry, with the sixth book set in 2003 and published in 2010. The recent books, sometimes referred to as the Empire Games trilogy, realigns the timelines, skipping forward about 15 years to come closer to our own time.

But not our own timeline. One of the things I love most about this series is how it gets progressively more bonkers as it goes along. In many ways the 2020 vision of the "Timeline 2" version of the United States of America seems like a only-slightly-pointed critique of our own: a paranoid state, bullying towards the rest of the world, obsessed with spying on its own citizens, pathologically incapable of de-escalation. The specific reasons for that are slightly different, though: in the Merchant Princes state, the 9/11 attacks were shortly followed by the 7/16 attacks, where spies from an alternate universe detonated nuclear bombs inside Washington, D.C., killing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and much of Congress and the Supreme Court. Donald Rumsfeld became the Commander in Chief, authorized a totally annihilating counterstrike against the "Timeline 1" Gruinmarkt, and doubled-down on the PATRIOT act and other forms of domestic surveillance.

One of my annoyances with the middle books of the series had to do with Miriam's ambitious plan of technological arbitrage, using discoveries from Timeline 2 to speed up innovation in Timeline 3 without falling into a development trap like happened in Timeline 1. I loved the idea of this and wanted to read entire books about Miriam kicking butt and schooling people. Instead, after getting us all excited about it, she got whisked away to an evil Baron's lair, impregnated against her will and spends much of the series as a passive victim.

All that cool stuff eventually happens, but it mostly happens off-scene, in the 17-year gap between books 6 and 7. And really, that's part of the point. Miriam and the surviving members of the Clan want to avoid the mistakes of the past and have the civilization grow up alongside the tech, instead of having it be dropped into their laps. That means, for example, building a generation of computers running on vacuum tubes that they know will be obsolescent; but those more mechanical computers are easier for people to understand, and with some prompting they can then go and invent silicon processors on their own, and actually understand how they work.

The final trilogy focuses on a mix of new and old characters. The old are very old, and often complain about the aches and bodily indignities that come with age. Some of the new characters are related to the old, most notably Rita, who was Miriam Beckstein's illegitimate daughter we heard about way back in Book 1 and is now a young adult. Others are brand new, including Rita's girlfriend Angie, Rita's adopted grandfather Kurt (who we eventually learn is a very-deep-cover sleeper agent from the now-defunct East Germany), and Elizabeth Hanover, the daughter and heir to "King" John Frederick.

The earlier books culminated in a successful democratic revolution in Time Line 3, led by Sir Adam and successfully toppling the British crown-in-exile. In this timeline, the Industrial Revolution didn't start until the 1900s, France is a superpower controlling all of Europe and Africa and most of Asia, and there has not been a large-scale democratic experiment since the ancient Greeks. One intriguing thing we learn early on is the particular structure of the New American Commonwealth. It's a democracy, but as the very concept of democracy is unfamiliar to people, it has unique institutions and processes to defend against a return to autocracy. That system, we eventually learn, is modeled after the Islamic Republic of Iran. Sir Adam becomes the "First Man", essentially equivalent to the Ayatollah: not involved in day-to-day administration or policy, but the ultimate authority who will step in if the democratic ideals are threatened. A Council of Guardians-type body reviews and approves candidates and parties, excluding monarchists and others who seek to end democracy. And then there's the popularly-elected parliament who set the law and the ministers who execute it, under the watchful and generally lenient eye of the First Man.

The main plot of the later books has to do with a series of schemes between France and Britain. Earlier in the series, New Britain seemed doomed, relatively safe between the two oceans but helpless to block a steadily rising France. After 17 years have passed, France still has superior territory and population, but the New American Commonwealth has vastly outstripped it economically and even militarily, thanks to the advances engineered by the Ministry for Temporal Intelligence and the Department of Para-historical Research. The exiled King of New Britain has been forced to claim sanctuary in the court of his erstwhile rival the King of France. The Dauphin is promised to the princess Elizabeth Hanover, setting the stage for the destruction of democracy: France will then use its mighty armies to invade the Americas and restore the British monarchy, albeit as a client state.

Catching wind of this plot, secret intelligence in the Commonwealth comes up with a counter-scheme of their own. Elizabeth does not want to marry the Dauphin, who is much older and openly cavorts with mistresses and, rumor has it, has the pox. World-walkers make contact with her while she's in a finishing school and they come to an agreement: she will defect to the Commonwealth, renounce any claim to the throne, gain citizenship and a large sum of money. At the end of Dark State, this goes slightly wrong: her rescuer is shot, and then American agents from Time Line 2 break up the operation, leaving her stranded in an unfamiliar version of Berlin.

It's a fun, energetic story. I felt like the Elizabeth part was the core, but there's a ton of other stuff going on too: lots of political maneuvering in the Commonwealth when Sir Adam dies of natural causes and they face their first succession crisis; ongoing attempts by black-ops groups from the US to gain leverage over or neutralize the Commonwealth; and, just to keep things exciting, the introduction of an interstellar race of insect/machine hybrids who have also learned how to world-walk and have annihilated all life on millions of alternate versions of Earth.

There's a lot of plot threads all running at the same time, which is really cool, but it also means that the people in each individual storyline don't get a whole lot to do. Elizabeth did most of her exciting stuff in the previous book; here, she learns how to use a phone, goes shopping, flies on a plane, and talks to a camera: that's about it. It's pretty common for us to spend a little time with someone like Adrian Holmes or the green recruits and then never get their POV again. That isn't unique to this book or author: whenever I read, say, GRRM, I'll feel like I'm just getting interested in what one character is doing when the author whisks me away to a different plot line.

I had a few minor annoyances. I'm reading the first edition, and there are a few typos; I didn't see any in the previous books, so I'm sure they'll be corrected in reprints. I was also a bit turned off by some repetitive framing: reading someone talk about what they're going to do, then reading about them doing it, then reading them describe what they did. That would be appropriate for something like a television series where people are dropping in and catching up midway through, but doesn't seem necessary for a novel that you can read in a few days.

But I think most of my (mild) complaints boil down to me wanting more stuff to happen, and that's very petty of me. There's a lot that goes down, and more importantly, it satisfyingly ties up all of the major plot threads of the series. That's no small feat for a long-running speculative fiction series! Wanting more is a strong sign of how much I enjoy it.

Besides the straight-up plot, I also enjoy Stross just nerding out on topic. Unlike his cyberpunk books that have deep and trenchant insight into technology, these books go hard on economic, historic and political topics. I love the attention to, say, the fashion industry: we see how the Commonwealth's garment business is organized, with everything made to order, and thus clothing is much more expensive, but also of significantly higher quality, and not reliant on sweatshop labor or other abuses.

There is some straight tech stuff that's fun, too. One of my favorites is JUGGERNAUT, the enormous space battleship that MITI constructs in secret. It's apparently based on a real project called Orion that uses nuclear bombs to create the propulsion that launches a vehicle into orbit. In our own universe that would be a terrible idea for very obvious reasons, but in this series, you can build that spaceship in an uninhabited version of Earth, nuke it, then switch timelines once you're in orbit. The constant nuclear explosions are terrible for electronic equipment, and so the computers on board JUGGERNAUT are mechanical instead, able to ignore EMP bursts.

The whole approach towards world-walking has evolved throughout the series, and Stross has the most fun with it in these final books, imagining how Newton's laws work. Another great late example is a near-stealth nuclear attack: in one timeline you fire off the ICBM, wait for its booster to eject, wait for the warheads to detach, and then switch it into another dimension, undetectable until immediately before impact. That's one way to make a bang! 

END SPOILERS

Based on the afterword, it sounds like Stross is definitely done with this series, and I'd say that he's more than earned it. I'm grateful that he wrote such a satisfying and enjoyable conclusion.