The Clan Corporate: Book Three of The Merchant Princes [Mass Market Paperback]

Charles Stross (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 28, 2007 | Series: Merchant Princes (Book 3)

Miriam Beckstein has gotten in touch with her roots and they have nearly strangled her. A young, hip, business journalist in Boston, she discovered (in The Family Trade ) that her family comes from an alternate reality, that she is very well-connected, and that her family is too much like the mafia for comfort. In addition, starting with the fact that women are family property and required to breed more family members with the unique talent to walk between worlds, Miriam has tried to remain an outsider and her own woman. She started a profitable business in a third world she has discovered, outside the family reach (recounted in The Hidden Family). She fell in love with a distant relative, but he died saving her life.

 

Now, however, in The Clan Corporate, Miriam may be overreaching. And if she gets caught, death or a fate worse is around the bend. There is, for instance, the brain-damaged son of the local king who needs a wife. But they'd never make her do that, would they?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Stross's lively third volume in his Merchant Princes SF series (after 2005's The Hidden Family) finds 33-year-old Boston journalist Miriam Beckstein still caught in a "barely post-feudal" alternate world where she's part of a mafiosa-like family called "the Clan." The Clan is holding Miriam's mother hostage in an effort to force the reluctant, thoroughly modern Miriam to make a politically advantageous marriage. Also dragged into deadly Clan politics is Miriam's ex-boyfriend, Mike Fleming, a DEA agent who has infiltrated Miriam's world on the orders of Homeland Security. Miriam's foolish, headstrong decisions help propel the fast-paced plot. Mike's discovery that the Clan may have planted nuclear weapons on our world raises the ante. While Miriam can be frustratingly dense, playing right into her captors' hands, the book gallops along to a cliffhanger ending that will leave readers eagerly awaiting future installments. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In the third volume (after The Family Trade, 2004, and The Hidden Family, 2005) of The Merchant Princes, Miriam Beckstein's situation continues to resemble an alternate-worlds version of The Perils of Pauline. Having escaped immediate reduction to the status of breeding stock for her Mafia-like kinsmen, she lands in a third world, one in which, unfortunately, the local king has no brains. No heir, either. Ulp! Miriam suspects she has jumped from the frying pan into the fire, and also that her relatives may still be pursuing her to a probably gruesome death for defying their will. Persons in our world discovering that they have ties to others is a classic sf and fantasy theme; just see Roger Zelazny's two Chronicles of Amber series. Stross and his feisty heroine are currently about the best practitioner and heroine the old motif boasts, and many are and will be the readers hoping for more than the three volumes they've given us so far. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Tor Fantasy (August 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765348225
• ISBN-13: 978-0765348227
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 0.9 x 6.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #699,771 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles Stross, 47, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005 and 2010 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).

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#72 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars readable but a disappointment compared to the first two August 7, 2006

By R. Kelly Wagner

Format:Hardcover

The paradox about this third volume in the series is that although there's a lot of action, and many things happen, nothing happens in terms of character development or new ideas about communications between the worlds.

First off, this volume is not readable as a stand-alone. If you are new to the series, book 3 would make no sense whatsoever unless you read books one and two first - so if you're going to order this one, order all three. Second, although we have no new ideas and very little in the way of character in book 3, if you're reading the series, you'll have to read this one, or else book 4, when it comes out, will be unintelligible. In my opinion, book 3 should not have been published as a stand-alone at all, with its beginning in the middle of a conversation between two characters and its end in a cliff-hanger; Stross should have saved it and combined it with whatever will be in volume 4, for a larger book, one with more of a satisfying plot.

Such as it is, the plot of this book consists entirely of getting a few more of our-world characters aware of the existence of the Clan's world, and killing off a few important characters in each world in order to make way for whatever happens next. We get only about 5 seconds' worth of Miriam working on her technology-transfer business, and about 3 seconds of her flirting with James Lee, of the family that discovered the New Britain world, for romance. The rest is spies spying and the military plotting to blow things up (several different military organizations, in more than one world-line) and occasionally doing so....

As alternate history goes, since Miriam spends almost no time in New Britain in this volume, and most of her time in the Clan world is spent on internal business of royalty and etiquette, we don't really find out anything new about the differences between the worlds.

In short, unless you're interested in a few drug busts and a bit of military paranoia, the only thing to recommend this book is that it's a necessary bridge in the series. You could wait to cross that bridge until book 4 comes out, so that you actually have a destination, and then buy both volumes together. Read more ›

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Stross lost the bits that made this a compelling story October 13, 2006

By Esther Schindler TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I wrote a glowing review of the first book in this series, because Charles Stross had done something wonderful: give a character the ability to flit back-and-forth between alternate timetracks in two sort-of-parallel worlds. The second book in the series added the question, "What if there are *more* than two universes?" and our heroine, Miriam, naturally explored the answer while she experimented with the economics of "what can you carry on your back?"

While I wanted to know what happened in The Clan Corporate, reading it was a bit of a slog. That's because the story no longer has its anchor in a firm SF/F "what if?" question; it's just politics and intrigue and backstabbing. And it's not brilliantly done, I'm afraid; Miriam spends most of the time feeling like a pawn in someone else's game, and that's because she _is_. Things are done to her; she instigates very little, herself, and most of those decisions are fairly dumb. Nor do we have the opportunity to watch good character development. Even when she does things, she doesn't grow or learn very much from the experience.

Overall, quite a disappointment. I'll look at the next book in the series but I won't rush to get it, as I did with this one.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars inconsistent New Britain descriptions? May 27, 2006

By W Boudville HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Stross continues his engagingly complex series with this third book. He weaves an intricate plot, located in three parallel worlds - ours of the early 21st century, a backward medieval setting and one some 50 years or so behind us. Despite the fantastical looking aspect of the cover, this book, like its predecessors, is no fantasy excursion. Instead, it is a solidly grounded science fiction tale. If you are new to this series, seriously consider first reading the earlier books. Coming to this book cold can be rather confusing, and you'll miss a lot of nuances.

Stross came up with a brilliantly evocative terminology. In the world of New Britain, they have just detonated a fission bomb. They call it a corpuscular petard, inevitably and fetchingly abbreviated as 'corpse'.

There is one caveat with the book. In the earlier books, the New Britain society seems technologically equivalent to ours around 1900. That is, about a century behind. But in this book, they are now only some 60 years behind, being roughly where the US was in 1945, after having developed the atomic bomb. Granted, a basic plot statement is that there are worlds at different stages of development. However, the New Britain world seems to have jumped 40 years in less than a year's narrative. Somewhat jarring.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A quintessential "middle book" August 17, 2006

By Richard R. Horton

Format:Hardcover

The Clan Corporate is not, as may seem obvious for book 3 of a continuing sereis, a standalone novel. You really need to have read the first two books to properly follow this one, and this one (as with its predecessor) ends with a cliffhanger. The book has other "middle book" problems -- lots of it is just setting up things for the next book. There is not really enough action, especially for the first two thirds of the book or so, and there isn't really enough new going on. I'm not sure there was a way out for Charles Stross -- this book does do important things for the series arc. And it is not unenjoyable reading -- but it is also not brilliant stuff. Still, by the end the excitement factor is ratcheted way up, and the next book promises to be pretty thrilling.

There are two primary threads. One follows Miriam Beckstein, the series hero, as she struggles against confinement by her newly found family in an alternate world. She makes some political blunders trying to make space for herself, and she finds her mother not exactly on her side. To her despair, she finds herself threatened with marriage to the mentally handicapped younger son of the King. And she has made an enemy of the sadistic elder brother to her putative future husband. The other thread follows a new character, Mike Fleming, a DEA agent assigned to the secret investigation, back in the U.S., of the problem presented by the revelations of the existence of a possibly inimical foreign government with agents that can literally disappear to another world. Mike is the lead interrogator of the defector who betrayed Miriam's Clan. He is also, by a rather outrageous coincidence, an ex-boyfriend of Miriam's.... Eventually he is tasked with crossing over to the Clan's world, in hopes that he can get to Miriam and persuade her to help the U.S. But he gets there at an inauspicious time -- Miriam is caught in a palace uprising, and things have just gone politically pear-shaped again...

So, as I said, the next books promise to be pretty fascinating. Charles Stross's realistic view of political behavior is central to these stories -- there are several political entities acting, with completely different objectives, from multiple worlds at different tech levels. Some characters are mostly evil, but most are just out for their own side's advantage, from their own limited perspective. Miriam is an appealing character for whom we root -- but she isn't perfect, and she makes believable mistakes. The whole setup is intriguing, and a huge political brouhaha, involving three (or more?) worlds is clearly coming. So -- this isn't by itself Stross's best work, but the series as a whole is still worth following. Read more ›