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    Empire Games: A Tale of the Merchant Princes Universe
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    Empire Games: A Tale of the Merchant Princes Universe
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    Empire Games: A Tale of the Merchant Princes Universe
    Ebook426 pages7 hours

    Empire Games: A Tale of the Merchant Princes Universe

    By Charles Stross

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Charles Stross builds a new series with Empire Games, expanding on the world he created in the Family Trade series, a new generation of paratime travellers walk between parallel universes.

    The year is 2020. It's seventeen years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly-reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world. But Miriam Burgeson, commissioner in charge of the shadowy Ministry of Intertemporal Research and Intelligence—the paratime espionage agency tasked with catalyzing the Commonwealth's great leap forward—has a problem. For years, she's warned everyone: "The Americans are coming." Now their drones arrive in the middle of a succession crisis.

    In another timeline, the U.S. has recruited Miriam's own estranged daughter to spy across timelines in order to bring down any remaining world-walkers who might threaten national security.

    Two nuclear superpowers are set on a collision course. Two increasingly desperate paratime espionage agencies try to find a solution to the first contact problem that doesn't result in a nuclear holocaust. And two women—a mother and her long-lost daughter—are about to find themselves on opposite sides of the confrontation.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 17, 2017
    ISBN9781466835160
    Author

    Charles Stross

    Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won two Hugo awards and been nominated twelve times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Novella and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke and Nebula Awards. He is the author of the popular Merchant Princes and Empire Games series, set in the same world. In addition, his fiction has been translated into around a dozen languages. Stross lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

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    Reviews for Empire Games

    3.5/5

    114 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I saw an article by the author on John Scalzi's blog about this book and it interested me enough to get a copy from my library. I have never read anything by Charles Stross before but I see from his author bio that he has won three Hugo awards and been a finalist 15 times. He does build a convincing world or I should actually say worlds since this book involves four parallel Earths.In the timeline that is similar to ours people with the ability to move between worlds (world-walkers), called the Clan, nuclear bombed the White House in 2003. The US retaliated by sending nuclear bombers to wipe out the city of the Clan and ever since has been hyper-vigilant about preventing similar incidents. This has resulted in the state monitoring all communications and placing cameras everywhere. The timeline that the Clan came from is timeline 1 and the one similar to ours in timeline 2. But there are also two other timelines although timeline 4 is uninhabited at present. The third timeline is where refugees from timeline 1 went and it diverged from ours before the Napoleonic wars. In timeline three the French invaded England and the English monarchy went to America. America had a revolution against the monarchy in 2003 and the Clan refugees were able to help bring their science and technology up to close to timeline 2 by 2020. Although timeline 2 has no world-walkers they have machinery that can move into parallel worlds. They have also discovered that there are some children who have the recessive world-walking gene because Clan members had children with ordinary humans. One such child is Rita Douglas whose birth mother is Miriam Burgeson, a leader of the world-walkers in timeline 2. The US has learned how to turn on the recessive world-walking gene and they plan to infiltrate Rita into Timeline 2 so they can learn more about it. Like all plans this one goes awry.I thought there were too many characters to keep track of and even with a list of characters at the back I struggled to remember who was who. There is also an error in the list: Rita's sibling is a boy but the character list calls River Douglas Rita's sister. I also felt that some of the subplots could have been left out since they don't get resolved in this book. I know there are going to be further books in the series but I will have forgotten those details by the time I go to read them (and yes I probably will read them) so they could have been left until the next book.
    • 4/5
      Charles Stross's great subject is nuclear holocaust. He doesn't always - or even usually - bring out the explosions explicitly. More often, it's Chthuloid creatures hungering to eat our minds, or robots cheerily carrying on after we're extinct. But the specter of holocaust brings a sense of awful, potential finality to his stories.Here, we have the seventh novel in his "Merchant Princes" series. There exist numerous alternate timelines, some with histories close to ours, some much more distant. A crime family of people who call themselves the Clan have the hereditary ability to transport themselves, with often-illicit cargo, between timelines. Worldwalking smugglers can cross borders easily, by shifting to worlds where those borders do not exist. I had not been reading these books, but this episode is written to be an entry point for new readers, so I thought I'd try it. A brief summary at the beginning brings the reader up to date, as do introductions to characters from the earlier books.Events in the first six books evidently focused on the Clan's medieval, home timeline (Timeline One), and a high-tech Timeline Two with a history very like our own - up through 2003, when a Clan worldwalker nuked the White House. The now-divergent high-tech timeline carried out a return strike, leaving the eastern part of North America in Timeline One dangerously radioactive.In 2020, the remnant of the Clan have moved to Timeline Three, wherein politics center on a Cold War-style thermonuclear standoff between a nascent, English democracy in the Americas and a despotic, French empire ruling Eurasia. The Clan serve as spies against Timeline Two, frantically trying to bring Three's computer and biological technology up to the level of an extremely paranoid, panopticon-surveillance society in which the Department of Homeland Security gets whatever it wants.The political leaders of Timeline Two, meanwhile, see such surveillance as only right, to guard against threats that can literally materialize nearly anywhere - and did destroy the White House, killing the president. Two has artificial means of crosstime transit, and a few residents descended from Clan members - but these people have only one copy of the recessive gene needed for worldwalking, and thus no native power to do so. But biotech advances rapidly. Meet Rita Douglas, underemployed 25 year old, raised in an adoptive family. Rita has some very interesting genes that can now be activated. She is..."convinced" might be the word...to become DHS's first worldwalking, covert asset. Some of the airborne drones crossing into Three have failed to return, and atmospheric sampling probles detect recent use of nuclear weapons. Stross's extrapolation of spy tradecraft into a reality of multiple timelines is quite fascinating, as Rita carefully explores a railway switchyard that is the only location in Three known to the intelligence community of Two. Can the two nuclear-armed timelines manage peaceful contact? Will Mutual Assured Destruction be their best solution? Stakes are further heightened because the new American democracy in Three is approaching its first political succession, closely watched by the tyranny across the seas.Stross raises a number of questions that future books will explore. What is the proper role of an intellgence community in a free society? Can a society be both free and safe against sudden, covert nuclear attack? What does immersion in spy tradecraft do to its practitioners? Why was Rita's adoptive family so perfect for fitting her to a future job as a spy? What is the meaning of the mysterious ruins in Timeline Four?The book starts a number of threads that won't resolve until future books. But it's a good place to start if Stross's other big series, the Laundry stories, haven't been giving you enough tastes of his talent for morphing the nuclear threat we live with into science-fiction and fantasy modes.
    • 4/5
      Stross opens a new chapter in his Merchant Princes saga, set several years after the previous and introducing a new generation of characters. While I enjoyed the book and look forward to more, this entry mostly sets the table for what is to come.
    • 2/5
      I’ve never read any Charles Stross before, but he’s been on my wishlist for a very long time, so I was excited to read this book. It’s set in the world of his Merchant Princes (also known as Family Trade) books, but it’s the start of a new series. I had high hopes, but I ended up being a little underwhelmed.After terrorist “world walkers” from an alternate timeline nuked the White House, the U.S. has become a paranoid surveillance state. Rita Douglas is the adopted daughter of a family that knows how to keep their head down and out of trouble – her grandparents escaped from the GDR and outwitted the Stasi. Unknown to her, the U.S. government has been keeping tabs on her since she was eight – her birth mother was a known world walker and she has the gene as well. She’s recruited to become the first American world walker spy. Meanwhile, her birth mother is trying to rebuild modern technology in an alternate timeline while waiting for the inevitable U.S. first contact.There are a couple of reasons why I didn’t love this book, the biggest one being that I just didn’t believe the picture that Stross painted of the timeline closest to our world. It was the same until 2003 when the nuclear attack on the White House happened, but since then, the Bill of Rights has become a farce, conservative values have taken root (Roe vs. Wade was overturned), society is more overtly racist and homophobic, and India and Pakistan have had a nuclear war. Surveillance is everywhere – every street corner has a camera, and there are advanced algorithms to identify suspicious people.The danger of setting up an alternate reality that diverged only a few years ago is that it will inevitably ring false to many people. Everyone has opinions about the times they live in. I just couldn’t believe that Americans would give up privacy or civil liberties to such an extent, or that our increasingly liberal world would suddenly descend into a moral panic about race or homosexuality. And India and Pakistan having a nuclear war struck me as exceedingly unlikely – there’s no political gain to either country going to war (much less nuclear war), and I don’t think there would be popular support for war at all (from having grown up in India.) References to “President Rumsfield” implementing draconian surveillance measures, and far too many references to the “Defense of Marriage Act” made me suspicious that the author was using the story as kind of a dumping ground for his politics.The story and characters were fine, but they were inseparable from the world, so it made me hard to get invested in them. The tone of the book is an old school spy/tradecraft story, with much lamenting about skills lost after the Cold War ended. Without the world being what it is, I have no idea who Rita would be. Miriam and her timeline are much more interesting – the problem of introducing modern technology rapidly to a society with old fashioned values is fascinating, and I liked seeing the glimpses of how that was being implemented.The book uses omniscient narration, including things like behind-the-scenes transcripts from Rita’s handlers, and that meant there was very little tension in the story. There was no real anxiety about Rita’s mission to the other timeline because we’ve been following the other timeline through Miriam and we know they’re fairly nice people. Rita’s contentious relationship with her handlers could have been a lot more ominous, but we’re reading their transcripts and we know they’re well-intentioned even if they occasionally misjudge her. There are hints of a larger threat established, but since they haven’t been encountered at all so far, that doesn’t add much excitement either.I’m not saying this was a bad book – it was well written and well executed for what it wanted to be. What it wanted to be just wasn’t for me.
    • 2/5
      I remember reading the first two installments in the Merchant Princes series and not being interested enough to finish the series. This installment was OK, but, again not engaging enough to make me want to read another, or to go back and read the other 4 I missed. If you're new to the series, it looks like you can jump right in here and get caught up. Stross spends a lot of time in thie book telling back story. Maybe that's necessary even to followers of the series since it's been awhile. But I had specific criticisms of this book.The story is being told across several timelines. OK, that's clear. It's also clear that the timelines are concurrent. But often in the book, he's picking up pieces from different timelines out of time order. For example, something is going on in Timeline 2 in August 2020. Then he jumps to Timeline 3 in May 2020. It was too confusing. The sections of what appear to be meeting transcripts were less than effective because it was difficult at times to place what they were talking about in the context of the story.Near the end of the book, two events happened that are clearly going to be explored in the next book but I found them too unbelievable. I know, in a book that posits people being able to jump to alternate timelines by staring at a picture of a knot, maybe nothing should be unbelievable, but people are people regardless. The late introduction of a love interest for Rita just simply came out of left field. Also, although the paranoia of her former East German Stassi member grandfather (is he perhaps a character introduced in an earlier book/) was well established, his plan "to get the band back together" at the end of the book was laughable.
    • 3/5
      Another inexplicably named book in the Clan vs US series, this one pretty much completely without any lure of fascinating discovery - two grim dehumanizing powers use people for base purposes. Why should I care.
    • 4/5
      This a wonderful start to the follow up to the Family Trade. The surveillance state of this alternate 2020 is sadly a little too believable. I can't wait for the rest.
    • 4/5
      To quote from the back cover blurb: "The year is 2020. Two nuclear superpowers across time lines, one in the midst of a technological revolution and the other a hyperpolice state, are set on a collision course"That's a good way to summarize the situation, guess which one of those two is 'our' timeline! If you guessed 'hyperpolice state', you win and the NSA will be stopping by very soon to pick you up. Just kidding, but it is clear that Mr. Stross is warning us about the increasing level of surveillance and police powers in the country today. This book was written in 2016, so he wasn't predicting very far in the future.He is using multiple timelines of very similar Earths with time hopping people to get his point across about the current state of the country. Mr. Stross is from the UK, so take his opinions with a bit of a grain of salt, but the warning is a good one to think about. I found this interesting and the characters engaging, even jumping in here at book 7 without reading the previous books. It was pretty clear I'd jumped into the middle of a series, a few parts felt like summaries, but not overtly. Very good stuff, I'll be going back and reading the previous and following books.
    • 4/5
      Seventeen years ago the Monarch of the New British Empire was overthrown. Since then power has steadily transferred to the North American Commonwealth. They are on course to defeat the French and return democracy once again. However, the commissioner of the shadowy Ministry of Intertemporal Research and Intelligence tasked with monitoring the movement of people through the paratime links between the parallel worlds has been warning that the Americans are coming. No one believed Miriam Burgeson but as the leader’s health fails, the first American drones appear in the skies.

      In another timeline and a different America, Rita has been identified as world-walker, an individual who can switch between the parallel worlds with ease. She is a feisty individual, not completely sure why a shadowy agency wants her but presented with precisely no choice in the matter. First, she must be trained, undergo surgery and be indoctrinated, but the time is cut shorter as the pressure grows on the US to find out what is happening in the world alongside theirs. The perils of first contact between the worlds is heightened as they both have nuclear capability and no one knows if this battle will go white hot once again.

      This is a fast-paced mash-up of the spy and military genres set in a near future sci-fi world; or should that be worlds. There is plenty of drama in the plot, with the odd twist that enhances the storyline no end. Like all good sci-fi books, it manages to mess with your head whilst sounding eminently plausible, the various societies that Stross has created do take a while to get your head around too. It leaves many questions unanswered making the ending a little bit scrappy, but as it is the beginning of a series, I don’t mind that so much. Very much looking forward to the next one.
    • 3/5
      Tricky. Moving the timeline forward, but not enough to remove characters that survived the previous books. Seems to crowd the narrative a bit, but still an enjoyable read. I'm hoping the world breaks free of the 'timeline 3 vs timeline 2' concept, just because it rings a little similar to the 'timeline 1 vs timeline 2 concept' that ran the previous books.
    • 2/5
      I keep trying to read this series but the way the narrative is written - switching between what feels like a voice over then on to someone else's story, just keeps knocking me off my reading game. The use of different styles of dialogue (narrative, reportage, first person) and use of font signal a switch between different parts of the story, and I guess you could put all the different parts together so that they read as a linear story, which obviously isn't what Stross is going for but might help me keep reading!
    • 4/5
      My entry into the Merchant Paratime series. Wonderfully built world and nice characterisation for the leads.
    • 3/5
      Seventeen years after the original trilogy, the US recruits Miriam’s daughter and trains her as an operative to spy on the timeline they’ve found that has advanced enough technology to threaten them. Meanwhile, Miriam’s adopted timeline is progressing rapidly with its borrowed technology and push to catch up, but politically is still quite unstable. Very much a transitional volume to get to the next part.