Empire Games
A Tale of the Merchant Princes Universe
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Charles Stross builds a new series with Empire Games, expanding on the world he created in the Family Trade series, a new generation of paratime travellers walk between parallel universes.
The year is 2020. It's seventeen years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly-reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world. But Miriam Burgeson, commissioner in charge of the shadowy Ministry of Intertemporal Research and Intelligence—the paratime espionage agency tasked with catalyzing the Commonwealth's great leap forward—has a problem. For years, she's warned everyone: "The Americans are coming." Now their drones arrive in the middle of a succession crisis.
In another timeline, the U.S. has recruited Miriam's own estranged daughter to spy across timelines in order to bring down any remaining world-walkers who might threaten national security.
Two nuclear superpowers are set on a collision course. Two increasingly desperate paratime espionage agencies try to find a solution to the first contact problem that doesn't result in a nuclear holocaust. And two women—a mother and her long-lost daughter—are about to find themselves on opposite sides of the confrontation.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The multiverse teeters on the edge of a new cold war in this overly long and complicated novel, a continuation of Stross's popular Merchant Princes series. In 2020, Rita Douglas, an aimless 20-something, is pulled into a plot by the Department of Homeland Security. Her mother who placed her for adoption when she was a baby is Miriam Beckstein, a world-walker who can pass into other timelines. Newly developed tech can awaken Rita's world-walking abilities, and DHS recruits her as a spy. Meanwhile, in a different timeline, Miriam and other world-walkers are embedded in the government of the Commonwealth, emancipated from the British Empire in 2003. Both Rita and Miriam are forced to navigate the apparatuses of their governments: the bloated bureaucracy of the American panopticon, and the scheming intrigues of post-revolution power players. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Miriam and Rita must try to negotiate peace or prepare for an interdimensional war. Readers new to Stross's saga might have unanswered questions, but this novel stands on its own. Stross roots his alternate histories and futures in discussions of privacy, democracy, and technology. These big themes (fun as they are) tend to overpower the small details, and the characters and relationships feel underdeveloped.
