Invisible Sun - Kirjakasa

dare reviewed Invisible Sun by Charles Stross (Empire Games, #3)

Written exactly for me.

5 stars

Invisible Sun is not perfect, but it's perfect for me.

The Empire Games trilogy comes to a very satisfying conclusion in this doorstopper of a sci-fi thriller, as multiple plots on multiple timelines collide in a Last Plan Standing kind of situation. The paranoid police state of divergent USA and the fledgling democracy of the NAC have set their schemes in motion and Invisible Sun is all about resolution and payoff. It's competence porn with an incredibly high level of detail, but I cared about the characters and I cared about the big picture and as a result the incredibly tense story worked like gangbusters.

Some will object to the infodumps (I don't), and there is a spattering of editorial carelessness, but this may still be my favourite Charles Stross book of all time.

Martin Kopischke reviewed Invisible Sun by Charles Stross (Empire Games, #3)

Sometimes, taking your premise and running with it is all that is needed

3 stars

Stross’ Merchant Princes series, of which the Empire Games trilogy this concludes is a part, is a poster child for this principle: assuming there are parallel Earth timelines in which development of society (and life, at times) wildly varies, what happens when one technologically less advanced line discovers it can travel to a more advanced one? Start with a knight armed with a submachine gun attacking your hapless protagonist, and take it from there until you arrive at transtemporal nuclear powered space battleships parked on the ISS’ lawn.

If you think this sounds like a silly, incoherent mess, you can be forgiven: in the hands of a lesser author, it easily might have been. What saves Stross are his well rounded characters and an ironclad grasp of what plotting individual arcs along the basic workings of society and history means. Add complex, richly textured world building, a healthy dose of …

Stross’ Merchant Princes series, of which the Empire Games trilogy this concludes is a part, is a poster child for this principle: assuming there are parallel Earth timelines in which development of society (and life, at times) wildly varies, what happens when one technologically less advanced line discovers it can travel to a more advanced one? Start with a knight armed with a submachine gun attacking your hapless protagonist, and take it from there until you arrive at transtemporal nuclear powered space battleships parked on the ISS’ lawn.

If you think this sounds like a silly, incoherent mess, you can be forgiven: in the hands of a lesser author, it easily might have been. What saves Stross are his well rounded characters and an ironclad grasp of what plotting individual arcs along the basic workings of society and history means. Add complex, richly textured world building, a healthy dose of cynicism tempered by utopian optimism and some wry humour, and you get something that is not just very readable, but addictive and fun to the very end.

dare

rated it

Feb 18