The first book in this series started as a refreshing take on the world-walking motif, in which instead of people just being kings in a magic world and then occasionally coming home, they exploit arbitrage opportunities, bringing goods back and forth. It was an interesting spin. Unfortunately, it ended abruptly, without making much sense or wrapping up much of anything. (There's one set of characters, apparently intended for a later part of the series, who show up, have a conversation, and never interact with the plot or main character at all.) I nearly hurled the book across the room in frustration at the end. It was basically half a book.I was told that the reason it felt like half a book was because it, in fact, was half a book--that the publisher had thought the original was too long and split it somewhat arbitrarily in two. So I gave the second one a chance.This one has an ending, I guess. It's a stupid, anticlimactic ending in which a major character dies pointlessly without having anywhere near the emotional impact on the main character as the death should. And most of the interesting plot threads are still left hanging, so apparently we're just meant to come back over and over without ever resolving anything.Which is unfortunate, because nothing happens in this book. A friend told me she had given up after a few chapters, because the book consisted entirely of logistics. I finished it, and I can conclude that she was wiser--the book consists entirely of logistics. Oh, Stross sets up a bunch of potentially interesting plot threads. There's the long-lost daughter and the parallel adoptions, a bunch of people pretending to be things they're not, a lover who may or may not be able to be trusted, shadowy puppet masters, an entire long-lost clan who may have started a civil war a generation ago. But it's pretty obvious, from the lack of movement or development, that he doesn't actually care about any of them. No, what he wants to write is a thinly veiled comparison between 19th century mercantalism and the modern conception of capitalism. The first book is dedicated to using world-walking as a metaphor for the first. This second book is consumed with using world-walking as a metaphor for the second. So while we have no idea how Miriam handles the death of someone she allegedly cared about, we know in great detail how she launders funds to start up an intellectual property clearinghouse, including an examination of exactly what inventions might be best to import first to this random fictional world. (It's not like he's even playing around with what inventions might have changed history--he built the world, so it's no particular act of cleverness to declare that this esoteric form of brakes is perfect because they've invented the appropriate tires but not the appropriate brakes.)I'm done. I've liked some of his Laundry Files work, but I'm certainly not reading any more of this series. I would not at all be surprised if the next book is a thinly-veiled indictment of communism, given how he's setting things up. And I've got better things to do with my time than read a treatise on why the current leading economic theory beat its predecessors, with a couple nonsensical action scenes thrown in at the end to pretend it's a story.
Jumping straight into this book the second I finished "The Family Trade" felt particularly natural. Throughout "The Family Trade", I felt like I shouldn't be as far into the book as I was--it still felt like it was just getting rolling when I was less than 100 pages from the end. This turns out to have a lot to do with the changes Charles Stross made to this series between when he started writing it and when he sold it. I learned in an interview he gave Locus magazine that he'd originally planned to make this series four giant novels. Currently, it's projected to be six novels--and at the end of the sixth novel, we'll be at the end of what he originally planned to be the second novel. He expects to write another series at some point in the future that will encompass his original ideas for the third and fourth novels. So basically, this six-book series consists of relatively tiny chunks of what he'd originally planned. The interview goes on to make clear that "The Family Trade" and "The Hidden Family" were the two halves of what was originally intended to be the first book--meaning, I suppose, that the second book was originally going to be twice as long as the first. So, my feeling that "The Hidden Family" was merely the second half of "The Family Trade" has a logical source--originally, it would have been exactly that.I haven't talked much about the storyline in these books, and I don't really want to, as I hate it when I read a review of a later book in a series and it spoils the ending of the first or third book in the series. Therefore, let's stick to bare bones--Miriam Beckstein, a divorced journalist of independent means, learns that her adoption as a baby came about as a result of her having been brought into modern America by a traveler from an alternate reality, and that she herself can travel back to this alternate reality with the aid of a certain talisman. There, she is the daughter of a rich merchant clan who can "world-walk" from their world to hers. But the world she comes from is trapped in the middle ages on a sociological level, and her family expects her to submit to the role of demure merchant-princess who marries for status and wealth, not for love. She, of course, has other ideas.So this leads to all kinds of fun stuff--gunfights in medieval worlds! Multi-level courtly intrigue! Corporate piracy! And always, the undercurrent of a woman used to having equal rights struggling to maintain these rights and squirm out from under the thumb of her literally-medieval family. This book, like the one before it, is a blast.[Continued in my review of "The Clan Corporate"]
What do You think about The Hidden Family (2006)?
More strong female characters emerge in Book 2 of this series, and we get more interesting world-building, with the addition of an intermediate world between ours and The Gruinmarkt. But the plot threads become confusingly tangled and require a bit of unconvincing jiu-jitsu to resolve by the end of the book.In addition, while I enjoy the emphasis on economics, I'm not 100% on board with the idea that development at any cost is an overall improvement for every society, especially when no attention is given to the environmental impact of development. The author, for example, makes much of the fact that The Gruinmarkt stinks (from open sewers) and the intermediate world smells terrible (from unspecified industrial pollution), but doesn't discuss how governments play a role (or should play a role) in regulating the production and disposal of waste. Nor does the main character seem to care about this as a part of her own development plans. But perhaps this will be addressed in future novels in the series. Let's hope so.
—Maria
Dans ce deuxième tome, Miriam utilise son talent de traverseuse d'univers pour s'en aller explorer une troisième terre parallèle, coincée à peu près l'époque victorienne, et donc entre le moyen-âge de la terre des voyageurs et son Boston natal (qui est aussi le nôtre, en fait).Elle y découvre certains secrets des machinations ayant cours autour de sa famille, et se plonge dans des histoires géopolitiques très différentes.Comme le premier tome, c'est à la fois distrayant, subtil, bien amené. La seule chose que je puisse reprocher à cette oeuvr est en fait que l'héroïne a une chance proprement insolente. Mais je ne crois pas que le propos soit là. je crois plutôt qu'il est dans l'exposition des différentes théories économiques ayant pu avoir cours, du mercantilisme initial à une théorie polus moderne de la valeur du travail.La seule chose que j'attends, c'est le troisième tome, en fait, pour clarifier un certain nombre d'éléments de ce récit ... Enfin, je crois.
—Nicolas
This novel is the second in a series about a family with a mysterious ability to pass between our world and their parallel world, where history took a different turn. They've used this ability to become a cross-dimensional drug cartel, transporting narcotics into our universe from their much less developed one. The main character is a member of the family who grew up in our world, ignorant of her special abilities. I didn't read the first book, where she discovered her heritage and dangerous relatives, but I picked up the background without any trouble. In this installment, the heroine learns more about her roots, and finds a way to cross into a third universe. I liked the concept and enjoyed the sociological speculation, but other elements fell flat for me.
—Alina
