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quiss42's review against another edition
3.0
After having read all of the "Laundry Files" books, this one comes as a disappointment. This compilation of the first two books of the "The Merchant Princes" series contains less story line and character development than one of the LF stories. It's more a long winded story of intrigue, betrayal and the fight for influence - not my cup of tea.
Regarding the audio book version: Excellent reading, without this I probably wouldn't have finished!
Regarding the audio book version: Excellent reading, without this I probably wouldn't have finished!
jmkemp's review against another edition
5.0
Bloodline Feud is a reworking of the first two books in the Merchant Princes series. Charlie Stross explained why he'd rewritten them on his blog. Basically he'd written them this way and was asked by the publisher to split them into smaller books because the fantasy doorstop wasn't in fashion.
I'd already read the entire series so I was wary of buying the Bloodline Feud. The only reason I did was because it was on special offer from Amazon for 99p. At that price almost anything is worth trying. Bloodline Feud is mostly the same story, but it is better than I remember either of the two books being. Also the combining them into one volume works very well. The story has a better pace and feels like a single story rather than two smashed together.
That said, these aren't pure fantasy books. They're a modern thriller with a fantasy element. The premise is that parallel worlds exist. A recessive gene allows those with two copies to walk between worlds. Set around 2002, when the books were first published, they take a female business journalist and give her access to a parallel world.
Miriam is a classic unreliable narrator, almost the entire story is told from her point of view. There are other points of view so that the reader knows the bigger picture, but these form interludes to foreshadow later things or to explain other sides.
The Bloodline Feud of the title is related to the world walking ability. The family having realised how it works tries to keep control over itself. However, power struggles caused an internecine war. Miriam brings that back when she world walks, she's the surviving daughter of a marriage intended to stop the war. Her parents were ambushed and she was taken to the US by her world walking mother. Adopted as a child she knows nothing of her heritage.
Miriam is given a locket, which contains the world walking sigil. This leads to her switching worlds and coming to the attention of her estranged family, the Clan. Her return triggers more activity around the Bloodline Feud. There are assassination attempts on Miriam. This leads to her going with her journalistic leaning to uncover the background to the Bloodline Feud. This leads to her discovering a third world.
Worth a note on the worlds. We start in the modern US about 2002. This is the most advanced technologically of the three. Miriam then visits the home world of the walkers. This is topographically identical but much more sparsely populated. It appears to have been settled by vikings and history diverged hundreds of years before. This world is feudal and has a c16 level of technology, apart from what the clan has brought over.
The feudal nature of this world limits the viewpoint and nature of clan operations. They are intrinsically conservative. This makes them less interested in social and economic development than in trade. They use their ability to move information rapidly between places in their world. In the other direction they use their wealth and power to move drugs.
The Clan are largely ignorant of world three. Miriam stumbles into it when tracking the Bloodline Feud. Its history diverged from the modern US about 1745. The Hanoverian Kings ended up ruling the American colonies after a successful Jacobite rebellion backed by a full scale French invasion. This world is around late 19th or very early 20th century in terms of technology. It's also a police state.
Overall it is a very good take on parallel worlds with some really good female characters. Worth a read.
I'd already read the entire series so I was wary of buying the Bloodline Feud. The only reason I did was because it was on special offer from Amazon for 99p. At that price almost anything is worth trying. Bloodline Feud is mostly the same story, but it is better than I remember either of the two books being. Also the combining them into one volume works very well. The story has a better pace and feels like a single story rather than two smashed together.
That said, these aren't pure fantasy books. They're a modern thriller with a fantasy element. The premise is that parallel worlds exist. A recessive gene allows those with two copies to walk between worlds. Set around 2002, when the books were first published, they take a female business journalist and give her access to a parallel world.
Miriam is a classic unreliable narrator, almost the entire story is told from her point of view. There are other points of view so that the reader knows the bigger picture, but these form interludes to foreshadow later things or to explain other sides.
The Bloodline Feud of the title is related to the world walking ability. The family having realised how it works tries to keep control over itself. However, power struggles caused an internecine war. Miriam brings that back when she world walks, she's the surviving daughter of a marriage intended to stop the war. Her parents were ambushed and she was taken to the US by her world walking mother. Adopted as a child she knows nothing of her heritage.
Miriam is given a locket, which contains the world walking sigil. This leads to her switching worlds and coming to the attention of her estranged family, the Clan. Her return triggers more activity around the Bloodline Feud. There are assassination attempts on Miriam. This leads to her going with her journalistic leaning to uncover the background to the Bloodline Feud. This leads to her discovering a third world.
Worth a note on the worlds. We start in the modern US about 2002. This is the most advanced technologically of the three. Miriam then visits the home world of the walkers. This is topographically identical but much more sparsely populated. It appears to have been settled by vikings and history diverged hundreds of years before. This world is feudal and has a c16 level of technology, apart from what the clan has brought over.
The feudal nature of this world limits the viewpoint and nature of clan operations. They are intrinsically conservative. This makes them less interested in social and economic development than in trade. They use their ability to move information rapidly between places in their world. In the other direction they use their wealth and power to move drugs.
The Clan are largely ignorant of world three. Miriam stumbles into it when tracking the Bloodline Feud. Its history diverged from the modern US about 1745. The Hanoverian Kings ended up ruling the American colonies after a successful Jacobite rebellion backed by a full scale French invasion. This world is around late 19th or very early 20th century in terms of technology. It's also a police state.
Overall it is a very good take on parallel worlds with some really good female characters. Worth a read.
missmelia's review against another edition
adventurous
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.75
ashtardeza's review against another edition
5.0
This reminded me of the Amber series by Roger Zelazny a bit, which I absolutely loved as a kid... this feels like it's written in a smarter way though, with some interesting insights into economics and how certain events may influence the course of history. I can definitely recommend this series so far!
thearbiter89's review against another edition
4.0
Reading this really brings me back to my teenaged years when I first discovered Charles Stross and proceeded to devour everything he'd ever written. I rather enjoyed the first three or four volumes of the Merchant Princes sextet when they first came out back in the day.
Reading this again, I am surprised at how much I remember but also how much I had forgotten and consequently found surprising - although perhaps part of that might be due to Stross tinkering with the text to tighten it up a bit.
I will say this - The Bloodline Feud is the still the most conventional of the books - setting up a parallel urban fantasy setting with protagonist Miriam still learning the ropes and exploring the possibilities of using her abilities to run a real-time experiment in rapidly bootstrapping a pre-industrial society into modernity.
While all of Stross' stories have an overarching conceptual theme or point - The Bloodline Feud is about exploring the economic opportunities and conundrums of having parallel worlds at wildly differing stages of development and wherein paraworld transit is tightly bottlenecked by a small coterie of powerful rentier mercantilists - it is still the most...mass-market of Stross' stuff but ironically, one of his least popular or well known when compared to the magisterial Laundry Files - a curious inversion that needs rectification.
I give this: 4 out of 5 mysterious lockets
Reading this again, I am surprised at how much I remember but also how much I had forgotten and consequently found surprising - although perhaps part of that might be due to Stross tinkering with the text to tighten it up a bit.
I will say this - The Bloodline Feud is the still the most conventional of the books - setting up a parallel urban fantasy setting with protagonist Miriam still learning the ropes and exploring the possibilities of using her abilities to run a real-time experiment in rapidly bootstrapping a pre-industrial society into modernity.
While all of Stross' stories have an overarching conceptual theme or point - The Bloodline Feud is about exploring the economic opportunities and conundrums of having parallel worlds at wildly differing stages of development and wherein paraworld transit is tightly bottlenecked by a small coterie of powerful rentier mercantilists - it is still the most...mass-market of Stross' stuff but ironically, one of his least popular or well known when compared to the magisterial Laundry Files - a curious inversion that needs rectification.
I give this: 4 out of 5 mysterious lockets
mohsints's review against another edition
3.0
This is a fun book, but it feels raw and unpolished. Stress makes you want to keep reading by moving the plot along at a fast clip, but sacrifices complexity of character and depth of development for this pace. It's a great plane or transit read but I wouldn't recommend buying it for posterity.
abhrasach's review against another edition
3.0
This fun worldhopping fantasy makes me think Stross read a dimensional-travel story somewhere and thought, "If I had the power to do that I would do it SO differently." Couple of redundancies made me wonder if it was written as a serial at first. Kept me coming back anyway!
davybaby's review against another edition
1.0
Nope.
Heard an interview with Charles Stross and he seems like a smart guy with good ideas.
Apparently good ideas do not a good writer make.
Heard an interview with Charles Stross and he seems like a smart guy with good ideas.
Apparently good ideas do not a good writer make.
jmartindf's review against another edition
4.0
Charlie Stross puts this story squarely in the real world. Sure, it’s science fiction. But that only means that it has a fictional element to it. The rest of it reads as real as history.
Miriam Beckstein is a tech journalist in Boston and the adopted daughter of sixties radicals. She has a fairly normal life writing investigative journalism (and getting fired for uncovering the wrong bit of sleaze). Normal, that is, until her step-mother gives her a locket that her birth mother had when she died. Suddenly, Miriam finds herself in an alternate universe version of Boston. One where the Roman empire never ruled the known world, the Catholic church was never dominant, and the British empire never reached North America. Instead of Boston, she finds herself in the Gruinmarkt, a semi-Danish kingdom, stuck with medieval technology.
Besides a foreign land and a foreign language, Miriam has to contend with a new family. It turns out that she’s a long lost duchess, from a whole family of world walkers—the Clan. Unfortunately for her, while her family has heard of women’s lib, they hold no truck with it. They may have modern amenities and they may enjoy the high tech American lifestyle, but they’re still medieval underneath. Like Saudi princes in New York—they may look sophisticated and urbane but back in the Kingdom they’re still patriarchal jerks.
To make things worse, every member of the Clan is expected to contribute to the family business or die. When Miriam shows up, they waste no time trying to assimilate “Duchess Helge” into their pre-existing plans. Thus Miriam gets sucked deeper and deeper into her family’s affairs, almost entirely against her will. She has to fight hard to have even the slightest control over what happens to her.
There’s a lot going on in this story and most of it feels completely realistic. Miriam and her family are each acting in their own best interests. It’s hard to fault either of them for acting as they do, given the constraints that they each operate under. Their motivations and actions all make sense, given the worlds they live in. None of which changes the fact that Miriam’s situation well and truly sucks, even as she lives out the sci-fi dream of being able to travel between worlds.
The story would be well worth recommending just on that angle. But Stross didn’t stop there. He also built the story around development economics. Miriam desperately wants to raise the standard of living of the Gruinmarkt from subsistence-level medieval farming to modern industry. But how do you bootstrap an entire kingdom into the modern era? Especially given that the only cargo you can move between worlds is what you can physically carry, your family distrusts your every move lest you rock their boat too much, and the people of the Gruinmarkt consider you a witch?
This book is fun, thought-provoking, and frustrating (in the best possible way). This is exactly what good science fiction should be.
Miriam Beckstein is a tech journalist in Boston and the adopted daughter of sixties radicals. She has a fairly normal life writing investigative journalism (and getting fired for uncovering the wrong bit of sleaze). Normal, that is, until her step-mother gives her a locket that her birth mother had when she died. Suddenly, Miriam finds herself in an alternate universe version of Boston. One where the Roman empire never ruled the known world, the Catholic church was never dominant, and the British empire never reached North America. Instead of Boston, she finds herself in the Gruinmarkt, a semi-Danish kingdom, stuck with medieval technology.
Besides a foreign land and a foreign language, Miriam has to contend with a new family. It turns out that she’s a long lost duchess, from a whole family of world walkers—the Clan. Unfortunately for her, while her family has heard of women’s lib, they hold no truck with it. They may have modern amenities and they may enjoy the high tech American lifestyle, but they’re still medieval underneath. Like Saudi princes in New York—they may look sophisticated and urbane but back in the Kingdom they’re still patriarchal jerks.
To make things worse, every member of the Clan is expected to contribute to the family business or die. When Miriam shows up, they waste no time trying to assimilate “Duchess Helge” into their pre-existing plans. Thus Miriam gets sucked deeper and deeper into her family’s affairs, almost entirely against her will. She has to fight hard to have even the slightest control over what happens to her.
There’s a lot going on in this story and most of it feels completely realistic. Miriam and her family are each acting in their own best interests. It’s hard to fault either of them for acting as they do, given the constraints that they each operate under. Their motivations and actions all make sense, given the worlds they live in. None of which changes the fact that Miriam’s situation well and truly sucks, even as she lives out the sci-fi dream of being able to travel between worlds.
The story would be well worth recommending just on that angle. But Stross didn’t stop there. He also built the story around development economics. Miriam desperately wants to raise the standard of living of the Gruinmarkt from subsistence-level medieval farming to modern industry. But how do you bootstrap an entire kingdom into the modern era? Especially given that the only cargo you can move between worlds is what you can physically carry, your family distrusts your every move lest you rock their boat too much, and the people of the Gruinmarkt consider you a witch?
This book is fun, thought-provoking, and frustrating (in the best possible way). This is exactly what good science fiction should be.