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MERCHANT_PRINCES

                                             June 10, 2016

The "Merchant Princes" series by Charles Stross.

In it's latest form, this is packaged in three
volumes (each containing two of the original
books).

I've read "The Bloodline Feud" (2013),
which is composed of:

  "The Family Affair" (2004)
  "The Hidden Family" (2005)


Reading this was a pretty funny experience, because
it was a little hard to see why Charles Stross had
bothered with it.  A woman discovers she has a
strange, unsuspected ability to slip through to
another world, a parallel universe no less (jargon:
she is a "worldwalker").  This new land is in a
medieval state (the locals are dirt poor and disease
ridden).  It turns out that there's a secret
organization run by a royal family with the
worldwalking ability, which is genetically inherited...

So what is it with all this stuff, why would
a Charles Stross bother with this science fantasy?
And why would he milk it for six books?

Then I started to get it: he was Doing Amber.
Even down to the series-with-too-many-books...

And as the story progresses, it's clear he's
trying to take the economics of the situation         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
seriously and to think through the kinds of things
this organization can *do* with this worldwalking
ability-- in brief, they're stuck in the smuggling
business (or think they are) running high value
commodities across borders by shipping them through
the parallel world...

Our heroine gets involved with the
machinations of this royal family,                            SPOILERS
and eventually-- yo, SPOILERS--
finds a way to generate wealth by
shipping *ideas* between the worlds,
and starts to set up productive             Also, by the way-- remember we're
businesses that will eventually             in SPOILERS territory-- I was
modernize the rather nasty medieval         wondering what was up with this
world they previously regarded as an        rather impovershed fantastic
inevitable necessity.                       premise of only *two* universes in
                                            parallel...  but Stross does add a
                                            third, eventually, and there's an
And *then* I remembered something           obvious possibility (which the
I'd written about the Amber                 characters on stage rather
syndrome back in 2000, when I               unrealistically refuse to think
tried to think about what you               about, as the author reserves
could do with the material:                 material for the later books) that
                                            there are far more than three.
  "... the only workable
   story you can tell is
   the overthrow of the
   Technological Gods,
   the democraticization          MAKER
   of power."

That's essentially the theme that
Stross settled on around the same time
that I was thinking about it.  The
princes of Amber must abdicate, the
citizens must be empowered... for
the good of everyone, including the
royal family.


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