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A review by thearbiter89
The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross
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