thearbiter89's review against another edition
4.0
Reading this really brings me back to my teenaged years when I first discovered Charles Stross and proceeded to devour everything he'd ever written. I rather enjoyed the first three or four volumes of the Merchant Princes sextet when they first came out back in the day.
Reading this again, I am surprised at how much I remember but also how much I had forgotten and consequently found surprising - although perhaps part of that might be due to Stross tinkering with the text to tighten it up a bit.
I will say this - The Bloodline Feud is the still the most conventional of the books - setting up a parallel urban fantasy setting with protagonist Miriam still learning the ropes and exploring the possibilities of using her abilities to run a real-time experiment in rapidly bootstrapping a pre-industrial society into modernity.
While all of Stross' stories have an overarching conceptual theme or point - The Bloodline Feud is about exploring the economic opportunities and conundrums of having parallel worlds at wildly differing stages of development and wherein paraworld transit is tightly bottlenecked by a small coterie of powerful rentier mercantilists - it is still the most...mass-market of Stross' stuff but ironically, one of his least popular or well known when compared to the magisterial Laundry Files - a curious inversion that needs rectification.
I give this: 4 out of 5 mysterious lockets
Reading this again, I am surprised at how much I remember but also how much I had forgotten and consequently found surprising - although perhaps part of that might be due to Stross tinkering with the text to tighten it up a bit.
I will say this - The Bloodline Feud is the still the most conventional of the books - setting up a parallel urban fantasy setting with protagonist Miriam still learning the ropes and exploring the possibilities of using her abilities to run a real-time experiment in rapidly bootstrapping a pre-industrial society into modernity.
While all of Stross' stories have an overarching conceptual theme or point - The Bloodline Feud is about exploring the economic opportunities and conundrums of having parallel worlds at wildly differing stages of development and wherein paraworld transit is tightly bottlenecked by a small coterie of powerful rentier mercantilists - it is still the most...mass-market of Stross' stuff but ironically, one of his least popular or well known when compared to the magisterial Laundry Files - a curious inversion that needs rectification.
I give this: 4 out of 5 mysterious lockets
mohsints's review against another edition
3.0
This is a fun book, but it feels raw and unpolished. Stress makes you want to keep reading by moving the plot along at a fast clip, but sacrifices complexity of character and depth of development for this pace. It's a great plane or transit read but I wouldn't recommend buying it for posterity.
abhrasach's review against another edition
3.0
This fun worldhopping fantasy makes me think Stross read a dimensional-travel story somewhere and thought, "If I had the power to do that I would do it SO differently." Couple of redundancies made me wonder if it was written as a serial at first. Kept me coming back anyway!
davybaby's review against another edition
1.0
Nope.
Heard an interview with Charles Stross and he seems like a smart guy with good ideas.
Apparently good ideas do not a good writer make.
Heard an interview with Charles Stross and he seems like a smart guy with good ideas.
Apparently good ideas do not a good writer make.
jmartindf's review against another edition
4.0
Charlie Stross puts this story squarely in the real world. Sure, it’s science fiction. But that only means that it has a fictional element to it. The rest of it reads as real as history.
Miriam Beckstein is a tech journalist in Boston and the adopted daughter of sixties radicals. She has a fairly normal life writing investigative journalism (and getting fired for uncovering the wrong bit of sleaze). Normal, that is, until her step-mother gives her a locket that her birth mother had when she died. Suddenly, Miriam finds herself in an alternate universe version of Boston. One where the Roman empire never ruled the known world, the Catholic church was never dominant, and the British empire never reached North America. Instead of Boston, she finds herself in the Gruinmarkt, a semi-Danish kingdom, stuck with medieval technology.
Besides a foreign land and a foreign language, Miriam has to contend with a new family. It turns out that she’s a long lost duchess, from a whole family of world walkers—the Clan. Unfortunately for her, while her family has heard of women’s lib, they hold no truck with it. They may have modern amenities and they may enjoy the high tech American lifestyle, but they’re still medieval underneath. Like Saudi princes in New York—they may look sophisticated and urbane but back in the Kingdom they’re still patriarchal jerks.
To make things worse, every member of the Clan is expected to contribute to the family business or die. When Miriam shows up, they waste no time trying to assimilate “Duchess Helge” into their pre-existing plans. Thus Miriam gets sucked deeper and deeper into her family’s affairs, almost entirely against her will. She has to fight hard to have even the slightest control over what happens to her.
There’s a lot going on in this story and most of it feels completely realistic. Miriam and her family are each acting in their own best interests. It’s hard to fault either of them for acting as they do, given the constraints that they each operate under. Their motivations and actions all make sense, given the worlds they live in. None of which changes the fact that Miriam’s situation well and truly sucks, even as she lives out the sci-fi dream of being able to travel between worlds.
The story would be well worth recommending just on that angle. But Stross didn’t stop there. He also built the story around development economics. Miriam desperately wants to raise the standard of living of the Gruinmarkt from subsistence-level medieval farming to modern industry. But how do you bootstrap an entire kingdom into the modern era? Especially given that the only cargo you can move between worlds is what you can physically carry, your family distrusts your every move lest you rock their boat too much, and the people of the Gruinmarkt consider you a witch?
This book is fun, thought-provoking, and frustrating (in the best possible way). This is exactly what good science fiction should be.
Miriam Beckstein is a tech journalist in Boston and the adopted daughter of sixties radicals. She has a fairly normal life writing investigative journalism (and getting fired for uncovering the wrong bit of sleaze). Normal, that is, until her step-mother gives her a locket that her birth mother had when she died. Suddenly, Miriam finds herself in an alternate universe version of Boston. One where the Roman empire never ruled the known world, the Catholic church was never dominant, and the British empire never reached North America. Instead of Boston, she finds herself in the Gruinmarkt, a semi-Danish kingdom, stuck with medieval technology.
Besides a foreign land and a foreign language, Miriam has to contend with a new family. It turns out that she’s a long lost duchess, from a whole family of world walkers—the Clan. Unfortunately for her, while her family has heard of women’s lib, they hold no truck with it. They may have modern amenities and they may enjoy the high tech American lifestyle, but they’re still medieval underneath. Like Saudi princes in New York—they may look sophisticated and urbane but back in the Kingdom they’re still patriarchal jerks.
To make things worse, every member of the Clan is expected to contribute to the family business or die. When Miriam shows up, they waste no time trying to assimilate “Duchess Helge” into their pre-existing plans. Thus Miriam gets sucked deeper and deeper into her family’s affairs, almost entirely against her will. She has to fight hard to have even the slightest control over what happens to her.
There’s a lot going on in this story and most of it feels completely realistic. Miriam and her family are each acting in their own best interests. It’s hard to fault either of them for acting as they do, given the constraints that they each operate under. Their motivations and actions all make sense, given the worlds they live in. None of which changes the fact that Miriam’s situation well and truly sucks, even as she lives out the sci-fi dream of being able to travel between worlds.
The story would be well worth recommending just on that angle. But Stross didn’t stop there. He also built the story around development economics. Miriam desperately wants to raise the standard of living of the Gruinmarkt from subsistence-level medieval farming to modern industry. But how do you bootstrap an entire kingdom into the modern era? Especially given that the only cargo you can move between worlds is what you can physically carry, your family distrusts your every move lest you rock their boat too much, and the people of the Gruinmarkt consider you a witch?
This book is fun, thought-provoking, and frustrating (in the best possible way). This is exactly what good science fiction should be.
tartancrusader's review against another edition
1.0
Wow, this was a mess. It seems to me like the author couldn't decide which plot elements to include so he just included ALL of them. And the MacGuffins were just clunky beyond belief, not to mention arbitrarily ill-defined.
If the cut and thrust of High Finance and Mercantilism is your thing, then you'll probably enjoy this but for me it was dull, dull, dull. It was only my newly-formed intention to try much harder to refrain from abandoning books that kept me going on this one. I certainly won't be reading any more of this series but am willing to give the author's Science Fiction a try. Incidentally, I've seen some describe this as Science Fiction; don't be fooled - it isn't. It's parallel worlds Fantasy in which the worlds themselves were probably the best thing about the book.
If the cut and thrust of High Finance and Mercantilism is your thing, then you'll probably enjoy this but for me it was dull, dull, dull. It was only my newly-formed intention to try much harder to refrain from abandoning books that kept me going on this one. I certainly won't be reading any more of this series but am willing to give the author's Science Fiction a try. Incidentally, I've seen some describe this as Science Fiction; don't be fooled - it isn't. It's parallel worlds Fantasy in which the worlds themselves were probably the best thing about the book.
djotaku's review against another edition
3.0
This book was a free giveaway for Tor's ebook club
This book checks a lot of boxes for me: thriller, science fiction, multiple universes, alternate histories. But I just couldn't get into it as much as I wanted to. I think it was mostly around the way Stross writes his dialogue. I can't quite figure out exactly what it is about it, but it just didn't do it for me.
The plot twists were pretty good.
I'm never a huge fan of chapters where we don't know WTF is going on and everyone's being all cryptic. There were a few of those here. I'd rather either we know a lot more than the protagonists or know only what they know. But it wasn't too hard to eventually figure out what was going on.
I did enjoy the universe building he did. It definitely felt as though he was one of those authors who builds out whole towns and economies we never see in the book, just to make sure he's being thorough.
Not too much else to say. I did enjoy our protagonist being a literal kick-ass woman. I thought the journalist trope worked well for her as it gave her a reason to have good deductive reasoning skills around what was going on as well as a way of getting information out of people. She was, however, THIRSTY AF! I don't ever think I've read a book with someone so constantly sprung outside of the strange, semi-erotica of [b:Vagina Mundi|22905573|Vagina Mundi|Wol-vriey|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1408017031s/22905573.jpg|42440908]. While it's never explicit (that I can remember), you definitely know what's up when she's with her beau (pun intended).
This book checks a lot of boxes for me: thriller, science fiction, multiple universes, alternate histories. But I just couldn't get into it as much as I wanted to. I think it was mostly around the way Stross writes his dialogue. I can't quite figure out exactly what it is about it, but it just didn't do it for me.
The plot twists were pretty good.
I'm never a huge fan of chapters where we don't know WTF is going on and everyone's being all cryptic. There were a few of those here. I'd rather either we know a lot more than the protagonists or know only what they know. But it wasn't too hard to eventually figure out what was going on.
I did enjoy the universe building he did. It definitely felt as though he was one of those authors who builds out whole towns and economies we never see in the book, just to make sure he's being thorough.
Not too much else to say. I did enjoy our protagonist being a literal kick-ass woman. I thought the journalist trope worked well for her as it gave her a reason to have good deductive reasoning skills around what was going on as well as a way of getting information out of people. She was, however, THIRSTY AF! I don't ever think I've read a book with someone so constantly sprung outside of the strange, semi-erotica of [b:Vagina Mundi|22905573|Vagina Mundi|Wol-vriey|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1408017031s/22905573.jpg|42440908]. While it's never explicit (that I can remember), you definitely know what's up when she's with her beau (pun intended).
nwhyte's review against another edition
4.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3776157.html
This is a compilation and revision of the first two books in Stross's Merchant Princes series (originally intended to be one book rather than two). When I read the first, The Family Trade, in 2005, I wrote:
"I had been looking forward to reading this for some time. Reviews that I had skimmed (and indeed hints dropped by the author) led me to understand that it borrows the feudal and feuding families who can walk between the worlds of Roger Zelazny's Amber series, a firm favourite of mine from an early age. But my anticipation was mixed with a little trepidation: even Zelazny was unable to really pull it off in the end - while the Amber books contain some of his most lyrical prose, the plot has holes you can drive an army of dark, clawed, fanged, furry man-like creatures through, and his own interest and energy had very obviously faded by the middle of the second series. And as for the Betancourt prequels - critical reaction has been pretty unanimous, so I don't think I'll bother.
Well, I think Charlie has pulled it off. He's taken Zelazny's idea and wondered what people with that ability would actually do with it in today's world; applied an economic model to it, if you like. Amber was always supposedly a great trading nexus (Corwin had written its anthem, the Ballad of the Water Crossers), but the evidence of this was pretty minimal - rather than wealth, its children seemed to be more attracted to power, and went off to find kingdoms and wars of their own. In the Stross version, there is a convincing business model using the fact that those with the gift can shift between our world and one where the Vikings settled North America and Europe never developed (and, we suspect, at least one other such parallel universe). Also in the Stross version, we have a plot that makes sense and is compelling reading; and some very interesting and complex characters. The Family Trade doesn't have the vivid imagery of some of his other work, but I sat up much later than I should have last night to finish it, and now can't wait for the sequel, The Hidden Family."
A few weeks later, I wrote of the second part, The Hidden Family:
"I once again sat up far too late reading this, the sequel to The Family Trade. And enjoyed it too. Our heroine from the first book has a business plan, an economic model, three parallel universes to trade between, and a bunch of enemies out to kill her. Some vivid scene-setting, including of the weather; one nice little touch which reminded me of my debate with Ken MacLeod back in August:
I don't know much about English history, but it's got this civil war in the sixteen forties, goes on and on about some dude called the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. I looked him up in Encarta and yes, he's there, too. I didn't know the English had a civil war, and it gets better: they had a revolution in 1688, too! Did you know that? I sure didn't, and it's not in Encarta -- but I didn't trust it, so I checked Britannica and it's kosher. Okay, so England has a lot of history, and it's all in the wrong order.
As the climax loomed and the number of pages left to read dwindled rapidly, I began to wonder if the book would end on a genuine cliff-hanger to encourage us to look out for The Clan Corporate. But in fact enough was resolved - if in a bit of a rush - for the story to come to a satisfactory halt for now.
Charlie does like his feisty women heroes! And does them well."
Sixteen years on, I had forgotten enough of the plot to enjoy it all over again, and also to note that some of the rough edges have been filed off. Perhaps I know the northeast of the US a bit better now than I did, after various visits to my brother in Boston and my former employers in New York, and also a bit more historical background reading, so it all cohered a bit better in my mind. I still love Zelazny and Amber, but I also really like the economic/business mindset that Stross's heroine brings to a similar situation, and the desperate attempts of surveillance states in each of the parallel worlds to keep track of people who can move between them.
This is a compilation and revision of the first two books in Stross's Merchant Princes series (originally intended to be one book rather than two). When I read the first, The Family Trade, in 2005, I wrote:
"I had been looking forward to reading this for some time. Reviews that I had skimmed (and indeed hints dropped by the author) led me to understand that it borrows the feudal and feuding families who can walk between the worlds of Roger Zelazny's Amber series, a firm favourite of mine from an early age. But my anticipation was mixed with a little trepidation: even Zelazny was unable to really pull it off in the end - while the Amber books contain some of his most lyrical prose, the plot has holes you can drive an army of dark, clawed, fanged, furry man-like creatures through, and his own interest and energy had very obviously faded by the middle of the second series. And as for the Betancourt prequels - critical reaction has been pretty unanimous, so I don't think I'll bother.
Well, I think Charlie has pulled it off. He's taken Zelazny's idea and wondered what people with that ability would actually do with it in today's world; applied an economic model to it, if you like. Amber was always supposedly a great trading nexus (Corwin had written its anthem, the Ballad of the Water Crossers), but the evidence of this was pretty minimal - rather than wealth, its children seemed to be more attracted to power, and went off to find kingdoms and wars of their own. In the Stross version, there is a convincing business model using the fact that those with the gift can shift between our world and one where the Vikings settled North America and Europe never developed (and, we suspect, at least one other such parallel universe). Also in the Stross version, we have a plot that makes sense and is compelling reading; and some very interesting and complex characters. The Family Trade doesn't have the vivid imagery of some of his other work, but I sat up much later than I should have last night to finish it, and now can't wait for the sequel, The Hidden Family."
A few weeks later, I wrote of the second part, The Hidden Family:
"I once again sat up far too late reading this, the sequel to The Family Trade. And enjoyed it too. Our heroine from the first book has a business plan, an economic model, three parallel universes to trade between, and a bunch of enemies out to kill her. Some vivid scene-setting, including of the weather; one nice little touch which reminded me of my debate with Ken MacLeod back in August:
I don't know much about English history, but it's got this civil war in the sixteen forties, goes on and on about some dude called the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. I looked him up in Encarta and yes, he's there, too. I didn't know the English had a civil war, and it gets better: they had a revolution in 1688, too! Did you know that? I sure didn't, and it's not in Encarta -- but I didn't trust it, so I checked Britannica and it's kosher. Okay, so England has a lot of history, and it's all in the wrong order.
As the climax loomed and the number of pages left to read dwindled rapidly, I began to wonder if the book would end on a genuine cliff-hanger to encourage us to look out for The Clan Corporate. But in fact enough was resolved - if in a bit of a rush - for the story to come to a satisfactory halt for now.
Charlie does like his feisty women heroes! And does them well."
Sixteen years on, I had forgotten enough of the plot to enjoy it all over again, and also to note that some of the rough edges have been filed off. Perhaps I know the northeast of the US a bit better now than I did, after various visits to my brother in Boston and my former employers in New York, and also a bit more historical background reading, so it all cohered a bit better in my mind. I still love Zelazny and Amber, but I also really like the economic/business mindset that Stross's heroine brings to a similar situation, and the desperate attempts of surveillance states in each of the parallel worlds to keep track of people who can move between them.