Crafted as an aside to his harder-edged, singularity-driven science fiction and as a throwback and homage to Roger Zelazny’s Amber books, Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes cycle is simply great reading.
The setup is this: A modern-day woman named Miriam finds out one day that she has the ability to steps across dimensions and is considered royalty in one such reality. This family has amassed great riches and power by carefully breeding children with said dimension-shifting ability, and they use these shifters as mules, taking huge payments in our world to move drugs and other valuable cargo from place to place, undetected by Earth authorities.
In the third book in the series, THE CLAN CORPORATE, events first put into place in books one and two start coming together, and Miriam not only has to deal with family squabbles and royal etiquette, but a nefarious conspiracy and, unlikely as it seems, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
You see, the fuzz have an extradimensional stool pigeon. He’s telling them the secrets of dimensional travel, and homeland security doesn’t stop at the borders of our dimension.
Stross is a great writer, and it’s a testament to his other work that the convoluted family ties and plot seems somewhat simple in comparison. But THE CLAN CORPORATE – one of the Sci-Fi Channel Essential picks – stands along with its predecessors as a fresh reimagination of a subgenre that had gone stale years ago. It’s one of those science fiction books that has much broader appeal than, say, IRON SUNRISE, but is in no way less satisfying. My only gripe is the cliffhanger: With one volume coming out every year or so, it’s going to be a long wait to find out what happens next. –Ryun Patterson
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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THE SCI-FI ESSENTIAL SERIES:
• CHILDREN OF CHAOS by Dave Duncan
• OLD MAN’S WAR by John Scalzi
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I second that about the cliffhangers being way too much. Going from book one to book two was ridiculous. The cliffhanger at the end of Book Three (reviewed above) wasn’t as gut wrenching as the last two.