The Revolution Trade brings the first series of the Merchant Princes to a cataclysmic, horrifying finish. This is a strange book, hampered by a structure that doesn't quite work and having not as much a plot as a domino set of consequences from things that have happened in previous volumes. Stross is typically very thorough in exploring a detalied (if not always 'realistic') results of outlandish premises, and one cannot help but feel that in Merchant Princes this approach is at odds with a gripping plot. Revolution Trade reads more like a roleplaying campaign or a wargame that's gone off the rails than a tightly plotted novel. Possible and actual editorial errors pop up here and there to annoy the alert reader.

Even so, this is powerful, provcative stuff that I can't help but recommend, despite its un-evenness. Ultimately Stross gives us a full-on nuclear holocaust, and our main characters cannot but turn tail and run away, abandoning thousands of their vassals to a horrible death. Self-sacrificing heroes they are not, and the noblesse oblige of the Clan turns out to be just so much window dressing when they face an enemy that can absolutely devastate them and their tiny medieval kingdom.