Reviews and Comments

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.

I wanted to like Tracer, and truthfully there's stuff there to like. Unfortunately, there's more to dislike.

First the good: The physicality of everything is great. The parkour, the hand-to-hand combat, the action - it was all brilliant. I could feel my body wanting to move along with Riley, the main character, who's a runner on a spin gravity space station. Tracer made me want to start doing parkour again. Sure, everyone was made of iron and repeatedly survived injuries that should have crippled them right away, but I'll just chalk it up to pulp sensibilites. The same goes with the flat characters. If you're writing an action story, archetypes will work just fine.

However, there's the bad. The plot was an avalanche of stupid, straight out of your standard action video game. The antagonists' plans were sheer insanity, and not even believable insanity. The physics were bizarre - even though the novel seemed to be aiming for semi-hard science, I'm pretty certain that unless my maths is completely off, a major plot point involving the spinning of a space station would not work as described. The society just felt weird for a post apocalyptic story.

For me, the whole of Tracer just didn't gel. It really felt like a video game - a set of good action scenes, trapped in a D-grade plot we're supposed to take seriously. Video games are supposed to have plots that are about the end of the world, but Tracer would have worked better just as a high-octane crime story on a chaotic space station.