The Clan Corporate (The Merchant Princes, Book 3) (Hardcover)

by Charles Stross (Author) "Nail lacquer, the woman called Helge reflected as she paused in the antechamber, always did two things to her: it reminded her of her mother,..." (more)
Key Phrases: New Britain, Baron Henryk, New York (more...)

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.

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books (May 16, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765309300
• ISBN-13: 978-0765309303
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #274,927 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 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 "[e-mail]" (MD, United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

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 (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 8 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 (Scottsdale, AZ USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.