Customer Reviews

The Trade of Queens: Book Six of the Merchant Princes

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This series started off so well that I was anticipating years of enjoyment. But then, sometime in books 3-4, Stross took a horrible wrong turn. In my opinion, it was a big mistake to allow the current US so much access to the alternative worlds -- there could only be one outcome, one that destroyed the enjoyable pre-industrial worlds and the advantages of world-walking by individuals. Also, the "troop movements." I have never enjoyed battle scenes; to me they are one big yawn, and starting with Book 4, they became a predominant part of the narrative. Mr. Stross should have stuck with the gold he mined in the first two volumes, instead of switching from individual stories to societal apocalypse. What a waste!

Insisted, upon receiving the dead tree version on "first" rereading the whole series.
Finally reached the 6th book and started reading.
It's a huge disappointment.
Mr. Stross kind of scrunches the whole caboodle together, accuses the U.S. of A. of Genocide, gets rid of every character he doesn't like or doesn't know what to do with, relegates his heroine to a third rank role,she doesn't "grow" in the series as much as vaccilates to the whim of the author, then disappears while same author expounds ghoulishly upon a rolling barrage of A and H bombs.
What's more, he clearly expects that he'll be able to emulate such writers as David Weber in creating a profitable (to him) universe.
Not a chance!
Very disappointing read.

This is the sixth book of what should have been, at worst, a trilogy. Stross put too much filler into this.

What started as a fantasy series migrated to science fiction a few volumes back. It's now firmly in Tom Clancy or Dale Brown territory:

"At 11:00 AM Zulu time, the first of thirty-six B52H Stratofortresses ran its engines up to full throttle, and began its takeoff roll. It was a hot day, and the huge jet's wing tanks were gravid with jet fuel; it climbed slowly away, shaking the ground with a bellowing thunder like the onrushing end of the world".

If you ever wanted to know what would happen if the United States became seriously annoyed with Mordor, now you can find out.

It's sad to see such an unsatisfying end to what started as such a great series. The first two-thirds of the book is concerned with re-introducing characters and plot lines; it feels like a setup to a longer story.

The last third ties things off in a hurried manner, not so much concluding the plot as ending it. If you've waited to see how things turn out... wait a little longer for the paperback.

I've been reading these because I'm a huge Stross fan, but on the whole it's been a downward trend since the second book. This one isn't a conclusion any more than the others were. Two major plot lines that were introduced in this book are left dangling (the New Britain second revolution, Mike's reveal of WARBUCK's history), a horrific atrocity is perpetrated but there's nearly zero on the long-term result, etc, etc. Stross hasn't committed to writing more in this universe, so this is pretty much the end of it. Unless you're perfectly happy with the lack of resolution and a massive kill-off of uninvolved characters in place of a climax, this isn't a book you want to read. Wherever you stopped in this series, just pretend that was the end.

So why don't I give it one star? It is reasonably well-written, I still enjoy some of the characters, and the milieus remain interesting. But if I'd known this is where it would end, I'd have not started with book 1.

I agree with most of the other reviewers here. Stross took a tale that began as a mildly interesting quasi-fantasy and drop kicked into it straight into the realm of boring political science fiction with an odd undercurrent of nuclear joy that seems to have drifted in from a late night showing of Dr. Strangelove. It didn't work. Bad writer, no cookie.

The Arthur C. Clarke homage was nice.

This book really irked me, because it presented an unimaginative conspiracy theory doomsday retread instead of an engaging conclusion to what started out as a good series. Carpet bombing a world with nuke-laden B-52's is a cop-out. For that matter, the writing style for this carpet bombing feels... odd. Did Stross even write it?

Other complaints:

* World 3 (New Britain) always felt almost-but-not-quite interesting. In the end, all it was good for was an escape from World 2 (Niejwein). I was left wishing that Stross had never even created New Britain.

* Related to the previous point, there were way too many characters, many of whom failed to be distinctive enough for me to care about or even keep track of. Furthermore, the major characters did not reveal additional depth over the course of the series, which made all of the characters feel stagnant in the later books.

* What happened to the interesting plot lines that were hinted at in Book 3 or 4? Previous occupants of World 4, and suggestions of world walking capability having been genetically engineered were interesting concepts, and they could have been made into compelling aspects of the story. Instead they just fizzled out. It's as if Stross had interesting ideas to write about, but he wrote himself into a corner by dragging along too many uninteresting characters on uninteresting plot lines that he couldn't finish with any expediency.

* What's with the search/replace for "George Bush"/"BOY WONDER" and "Dick Cheney"/"WARBUCKS"? No other real-life government characters got this treatment (Rumsfeld in particular comes to mind), and the pseudonyms are garish and generally insulting. The caricature of these people as written is ridiculous, to the point that I found it offensive even though I have a quite negative opinion of these real-life politicians.

* I read the Kindle version of this book, and it was riddled with editing errors. Was the print version also poorly edited?

When I first started reading Stross's Merchant Prince series, I noted with interest that Stross considered Roger Zelazny's Amber series a major inspiration. I picked up an anthology of the whole 10-book series, but a friend warned me to read only the first 5, then pretend that there were no further books. I heeded his advice, and remain very pleased with those 5 Amber books. Other reviewers here have recommended that readers stop after the first 3 Merchant Prince books, but having seen where this series ends, I would instead recommend that readers avoid the series entirely.

Ahem. FIRST!!!!

Got home from work yesterday evening to find this on my doorstep. Thanks Mr Stross and UPS. I read it in one sitting.

Impressions:

1. Well, yet again, we have the problem of presenting the back-story to people who've not read the series. The paragraphs that are used to do this (thankfully, just a couple) begin to read just a little like submissions to the Bulwer-Lytton contest. I was actually waiting for punchlines.

2. Cheney. Well. Wasn't that anti-climactic. The Prince of Darkness gets it all, and then loses it all. It was like the end of "The Glass Bead Game." You find yourself going "Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over?!?!?!!!"

3. Mr Stross writes a really cynical take on the USA. From raining fire on the generally innocent, to preparing itself to steal resources from wherever it can, there's no crime too low for the USA. Considering the way the USA has conducted itself in the last decade, this is completely unwarranted. Still, Europeans, what can you do?

4. All in all, it's a bit of a letdown, especially given that this is the last book of the series, at least for now. The first 60% or 70% of the book deals with the results of exploding a couple of nukes (I don't think I'm plot-spoiling - see the book's cover). Pretty predictable, and pretty forgettable. You know, everyone going "Oh crap! We're all going to die! I mean, unless we escape!" or "Meh, I refuse to accept reality." Meanwhile New Britain's revolution unfolds with a bit of a French odor and world-walking becomes less of a strategic advantage, unless you're world-walking U-2s and B-52s.

In the end, the Clan sort-of gets away with it, the innocent and guilty are generally punished, and all sorts of loose ends are left for resolution in later books. Talk about the story that keeps on giving!

I love the overall conceit of the series. The many-worlds idea, middle-ages mercantilists being dragged out of zero-sum games into the world of business plans, the in-fighting to the death, are all loads of fun. In the end, however, the story took so long to unfold that the horse was well-beaten to death by the time all was written and done.

I've enjoyed a lot of Stross' other books, but in this series he wandered off into a frothing hatred of Republican politicians. It's sad when an author's personal biases make him abuse his characters and (literally) lose the plot. Introducing new characters and killing them off quickly is a weak tool for the author, and a sign that he has lost track of where he wants to go with the story arc. Inserting topical references in a book is a risky thing; the series is already terribly dated and will only become more so. A pity, because the series started out with great "sense of wonder".

What started out as a great series has devolved into "How much can I squeeze out of the suckers buying my books?" This book, like the one before it, takes three steps forward and two steps back so that the plot barely advances and the story is stretched out into at least two books more than were needed to tell the story.

Our main character Miriam escaped in the last book, but not before the Evil Dick Cheney and the Evil Conservatives with in her family went into an inter-dimensional nuclear war against each other. The New Briton's version of our Universe's Free Masonry, called "Levelers" has devolved into a version of the Soviet Union's Communist Party with it's own version of Stalin. So in this book three worlds turned to crap and Miriam still hasn't had her baby or found a safe place to land.