Charles Stross, The Family Trade (Tor, 2004)
The Family Trade is subtitled Book One of The Merchant Princes, which is a new series from Stross being marketed as a fantasy that is, to quote the advance uncorrected proof, 'a bold fantasy in the tradition of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. Now, as the Amber series set the gold standard for series dealing with 'world walkers' embroiled in family affairs where blood gets spilled all too easily, Stross has a lot to measure up to. Having read most of his published fiction, including Singularity Sky and its sequel, Iron Sunrise, and his riff off the cthulhu mythos as collected in The Atrocity Archives, I can say that Stross is a talented writer who can craft a story as good as anything that Roger Zelazny wrote. Is it as good as The Chronicles of Amber? Actually, it's better in some senses, as it feels more harsh, more in keeping with what I'd expect a group of people who can walk across timelines to be like -- ruthless, amoral, and very much interested in accumulating wealth to the point of avarice. In that, they are like the mortals of Zeus Inc., who control the time-traveling immortal cyborgs in Kage Baker's sprawling The Company series.
Right now I am almost done reading the third volume of the series, so I know it's at least that long. (Being a reviewer has its privileges, with one of them being that we see material long before it hits your local bookstore. The downside is we also get to see a lot of crap that perhaps should never see print. There's a lot of dross out there -- let's hope you never see most of it.) What I've read so far suggests Stross could be going on for quite some time with this series! I, for one, hope that Tor picks up the volumes beyond the already committed for third novel.
(Kage Baker's Company series was dropped by its original publisher after the fourth novel. Tor, bless them, has picked it up and committed to at least two more novels in the series. The first with Tor, The Life of the World to Come, was published recently by them. The second, The Children of The Company, is due out later this year, I believe.)
Now I want to deal briefly with a tempest that Tor caused by dividing the original novel Stross wrote into two novels, The Family Trade and The Hidden Family. (In the very early version I have, the third volume is called The Clan Corporate.) Together The Family Trade and The Hidden Family would have somewhere north of six hundred pages, roughly equal in length to the first five individual Amber novels. Now do you really give a fuck that it's two novels instead of one? I don't. Furthermore, I don't think any of you who gets caught up in the first novel, as you will most certainly will, will bitch all that much about paying $24.95 for each volume instead of what would have been more than $24.95 for just a single volume. Discussions I've had recently with several publishers suggest they believe $24.95 is pretty much the cut-off price for most readers to pick up a mid-list author which they're not familiar with. One even suggested that a better price would be $14.95, which is why he said that trade paperbacks do so well. The important thing, though, is that Tor is publishing this series, not how they're publishing it! End of rant.
(If you want stupid, look at how DVDs are released. I still can't buy the entire set of the Batman Beyond animated series, nor has Max Headroom, the seminal science fiction series, been released on DVD. That industry makes the publishing industry look sane by comparison!)
Now on to the matter of this novel. At the end of my review of The Atrocity Archive, I said 'Now excuse me as I must get back to The Hidden Family and see how Miriam Beckstein is doing in her attempted corporate reorganization of the Family.' But that novel isn't the one I'm reviewing today, so let's turn to The Family Trade where Boston-based Miriam Beckstein was, until shortly into this novel, a crack investigative reporter for The Industry Weatherman, journal of the tech venture capitalist community. Miriam has cracked what she thinks is a massive case of money laundering in the tech community. From there, her day goes downhill fast -- way too fast for her -- as, after she reports her suspicions, her editor fires her on the trumped up charges of 'sending personal e-mail on company time, and looking at pornographic websites.' A mere ten or so hours later, a mounted knight (!) with a machine gun will unsuccessfully try to kill her. For Miriam is not the orphan she thought she was, but rather a world-walking member of one of the six families of The Clan, a group in which a few members can teleport themselves across timelines. Oh, did I mention that they have become wealthy in large part by being the perfect drug couriers, for who can intercept them?
If the premise sounds familiar, in his blog Stross cheerfully admits it is.
Why not take the basic premise (a family of folks who can walk between worlds) and strip off all the superstructures Zelazny added to the mix? Reboot it in the context of a coherent alternate history set-up and see where it goes. Maybe even (being mischievous) add the 'child of poor but honest folks who grows up to be the [thematic] dark lord' sub-plot to anchor it more firmly in the marketing soil of the contemporary extruded fantasy series while laying the groundwork for a later refutation of the key thesis of consolatory return? I could get to have my cake (a long fantasy series) and eat it (the intellectual challenge of doing something new).
So Zelazny forms one of the primary influences here, especially the aforementioned Amber series, with H. Beam Piper and his alternative history writings being the other primary influence.
Now if Miriam was merely a member of The Clan, she wouldn't matter at all, but she's a world walker, a rare commodity, as only a handful of the Clan are. And being female, she can pass that trait on to her children. (One of the weaknesses for me in The Chronicles of Amber was how common the world walking trait was among the royal family of Amber. And how easy it was to do. Here, world walking is a real effort, with a splitting headache being just one of the costs associated with it.)
Unfortunately for Miriam, her intelligence and sense of how to make a profit are not what the ruling elite in her newly rediscovered family want her for. Complicating matters even more is that the home society of the Clan families diverged from our realty some centuries ago, with a different language (a German offshoot it appears) and a feudal class system in place with (at best) a medieval level of technology. Think cold drafty castles, open sewers, and not very romantic trips by horse-drawn carriages. World walking seems to have had the effect of hindering technological development.
Miriam is not merely suffering culture shock in the extreme, she's slowly realizing that she's become a pawn in a political game where one side wants her dead, and the other just wants her to be a quiet and compliant princess, something which is definitely not to her liking. Miriam is determined, one way or another, to shake up things in her family and the society they've created.
What I like most about Stross is his ability to write prose that's both believable and fun to read. He does a good job of giving you everything you need to believe that this society could indeed exist without bogging you down in the Heinleinian way of stopping the narrative for a lecture, as some writers do. I'm not kidding -- several recent novels I started got tossed aside after fifty or so pages because the authors thought common concepts should be explained by having a character lecture the other characters on the subject -- how does a beanstalk elevator work, or why guns don't work in this universe -- to name but two lectures I've encountered as of late. Stross is a far better writer, as he knows info dumps aren't generally a good idea when telling a story.
Miriam is a great character, and she's interesting enough to carry the series by herself if she had to, but you'll encounter quite a few interesting, well-conceived characters here. It is her story, but Stross wisely knows that no character exists by his or herself without a good supporting cast. One minor quibble is that I'd have liked to have seen more of her true mother in the first three books, as she would be an interesting person who could tell a tale or two. Likewise, her Family head deserved more time on stage in my opinion. What I'm hinting at is that this story has the ability to easily run as long as Baker's The Company series has, which is now six volumes (with the pending publication of The Children of The Company) in length. I, for one, am looking forward to reading the fourth, fifth, and even sixth volumes, if they get written.
Now a final note on genres. The folks at Tor think this is a fantasy, which is how they're marketing it to the masses. Bosh. It's a well-reasoned piece of science fiction that just happens to have a fantasy motif or two as part of its premise. If you like well-written SF, you'll love this series. If you like writers playing around with alternative histories, get ready to be delighted. And if you like fantasy in the vein of Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, you too will find much to enjoy here. I will certainly be putting it on my list of the Best Books of 2004!
