Empire Games



A while ago, Charles Stross wrote a trilogy of books about world-walkers (shifting from one version of this universe to another) that was ostensibly a fantasy but really an excuse to write about economics and politics, with some science fiction woven in. I read the first one, couldn’t get on with it at all, ignored the rest. This year, he started a new trilogy set in the same fictional universe (well, metaverse, given the constraints of his fictional “universe”), fifteen years later. I found this much more entertaining, which is to say I’m looking forward to the sequel (in January 2018) rather than skimming my Kindle across the room and out the window.

There’s still a lot about economics in these books, but it’s got more palatable as I’ve got older. In this world(s) there are timelines where the American and French Revolutions never happened, and there’s greater or lesser industrial development. So, put somebody into that timeline who comes from our world, and there’s a whole load of attempts to bootstrap a 19th-century industrial economy into a 21st century one. (This is a bit different to the previous books where, as I understood it, Stross was exploring a shift from mercantilism to capitalism.)

So anyway, this is a book where ex-Stasi sleeper agents may be a force for good, fighting for freedom, and if that wasn’t just an attempt to drive everyone crazy I don’t know what is. There’s examination of the strangeness of our current level of technology by referring to people without that, there’s a Greg Bear-like device that destroys planets (full details to come in the sequel, I suppose) and lots of twists and turns.

It’s also a book about spying and tradecraft, where you’re hoping the heroine gets caught, but only that she’s caught by the right people and not the wrong ones. There’s an exploration of how bureaucracy develops and feeds itself against the original purpose of any organisation (parallels with the Laundry series run deep) and there’s a female, non-white, non-heterosexual protagonist, which by no means revolutionary after Rule 34, is still a bit of a stand-out in espionage fiction in general, so although at times it feels like the whole thing might be a gigantic box-checking exercise, or at least a huge clockwork puzzle rather than something designed for aesthetic reasons, it’s also a shame that this is something remarkable.

A lot of world building happens here. There could be more plot, but it feels like this is a satisfactory erection of the dominoes, necessary for their demolition in the next two books. At least it’s not a long wait…


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