Starting to get tedious. The first book got me interested, the second gave me hope, the third confusion, the fourth a start to despair. When will it end? However I have ordered the fifth.

Ed Dalton, Oklahoma City

This book does not stand on alone. To make sense of it you really need to start with one of the first two books. There are 3 worlds (4?) available to the clan (loose group of families) which are: Earth, a medieval analogue, and a beginning industrial revolution analogue. The members of the families can travel between them at will but only with what they can carry. There are 3 or more plots between various parties on each of the worlds and the parties differ world to world.

The multiple plots are well done as are the characters but are impenetrable unless you have read the series. The plots have gone from being a good plenty to a surifet, hopefully some will get resolved soon.

There a few editorial problems and some misunderstanding of military arms. The M60 started as a light machine gun and was later demoted to SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) with the failure of the M15. Basically the families would have stock plied the Browning M2 50 cal heavy machine gun.

That aside in spite of the complexity it is a very good read.

THE MERCHANTS' WAR begins in the aftermath of Prince Egon's bloody massacre of those attending his brother Creon's betrothal, including his father and brother and a number of Clan members. During the chaos, our heroine Miriam had been able to escape from Feudal World (the Gruinmarkt) to Absolutist World (New Britain), which is where she finds herself at the outset of this installment. Her ex-boyfriend Mike from Our World and his commando team had also been caught up in the bloodshed, and things go very wrong for them very quickly.

The remainder of the book--I hesitate to call it a novel, because it is not at all self-contained--is largely about the playing-out of the conflict between the three major forces in evidence at the beginning: Egon and his fellow nobles, Miriam's relatives in the Clan, and Mike's cohorts in the U.S. government. All of these players are frankly repulsive: the Clan are gangsters, not the merchants advertised in the title of the book and the series; Prince Egon is a murderous tyrant, and his retainers are more than happy to rape, pillage, and plunder; and the people running the U.S. government crack-down on the Clan are sleazy ends-justify-means folks who reserve the right to set off a nuclear weapon in Boston and blame it on terrorists (they don't; they just think it would be OK to do so if it would help them out). Nevertheless, it's difficult not to feel some sympathy for the Clan, besieged as it is in Feudal World, Our World, and even Absolutist World. Given their cool powers, we want their internal dissidents (like Miriam's mother Patricia) to triumph and the Clan become a force for good, or at least a force for well-behaved multi-universal merchant capitalism.

The most compelling thread in the book follows the clever maneuvering of Egon and his cohorts against the Clan, as he blunts their strengths (superior technology and mobility) and exploits their weaknesses (arrogance, reliance on outsiders). The second most compelling thread has to do with Clan efforts to "discover" new universes, based on a suggestion by Miriam. An important discovery is indeed made, but we will not know until the next book what its import truly is.

Although a good fraction of the book follows Miriam, who does quite a bit of running around, her main task is passive: get morning sickness and fail to realize what it portends. As in the previous books, much of the action occurs in the presence of secondary and tertiary characters, like DEA Agent Mike and Miriam's cousin Brillana, without any participation from primary characters. If you can keep this large cast of characters straight after waiting the year or so between books, more power to you; I still don't remember exactly who Olga and Brillana are and how their roles are different, and I don't have the patience to go back to the earlier books to find out.

As with earlier books, this one is packed with a good dose of filler. Particularly annoying are the meetings between cardboard bureaucrats who we care nothing about, having stereotyped conversations, and doing virtually nothing to advance the plot. There is also a lot of fooling-around--what Miriam's Jewish father might call "mishegas"--that allows Stross to make gratuitous, jokey pop culture references that would better have been left out.

In conclusion, Stross has created an interesting multi-verse, and he's still got plenty of surprises up his sleeve. If conflict is the driver of plot, he's got more than enough fuel for several more books. I will probably buy them, but I will also probably remain disappointed with amount of filler and frustrated with the too-large cast of characters. If you've read the first three books, you're going to want to read this one, and you may even find it better overall than the earlier books--I did--but that doesn't mean you'll be happy with it.

Haven't quite figured out if I missed something not reading book III - I think I caught up quickly during this book. (Seeing your reviews on Book III I decided to skip buying it new.)

Remember - not all books are written to be literary masterpieces to be read and re-read until every last nuance of deep meaning has been rendered to great immortal thoughts to be endlessly analyzed in college papers..

Some books are just written for entertainment.

It is one of Stross' easier books to read - it still makes sense if you miss a word here or there. It's a good book to read if you want to relax, and at the same time have have some flights of the imagination as to what he wrote in Book V. It'll be fun seeing how he develops the new concepts he's sprinkled in at various points. Will it end up being a better written version of "Worlds of the Imperium" and gently slip into the whole genre of multiple worlds? Or is there some alien ueberintelligence where we are cattle?

And of course it'll be fun to see how The Pervert meets his just end...

Anyway - get the book. You'll have fun reading it, and you'll have fun re-reading it a few years later when the series is complete.

This series by Charles Stross alternately leaves me breathless for more, and at other points I'm ready to be distracted by almost any other book.

Let me start with the most irritating bit: the ending doesn't. The novel has no closure - it's just another chapter that leaves you on a cliffhanger. So if your attitude coming to The Merchants' War is "I might catch up with this series sometime, but I'm not in a big rush," it wouldn't hurt to wait for the next in the series. (I am annoyed by this. Give me SOME kind of ending, please.)

On the plus side, you note that I read it all the way through, and I obviously wanted to know what happened next. That's because Stross has created some pretty cool characters whose lives I want to watch. The protagonist isn't the coolest of them, though. Miriam might be the "main character," but it's because she's a catalyst and not cuz she's an inherently fascinating person. (Mike, on the other hand, is cool.)

The initial premise of the series is still golden: a very small set of people who, by gazing at a knotwork graphic, can transport themselves (and what they personally carry) to an alternate-history version of where they're standing right this second. Through the course of the books (and really, don't even imagine starting with this one) we've gotten to see how this ability has shaped "our" world and a few others.

Here, we have Miriam escaped from Certain Doom (that is, the last page of the previous book) and on the run. The viewpoint switches between various people whose lives she's directly or indirectly touched, and each of those people have their own goals and justifications. Some of these people's stories are more compelling than others, with irregular pacing that made me wish whole scenes had been cut ("Enough already!").

But at some point, Stross just got into the storytelling again... and I was happy to follow along.

Can you tell that I'm ambivalent about this book? I am. If you're completely in love with the series (and I can imagine how you might feel that way), go right ahead and buy it. I did like it; I just didn't love it. The Merchants' War isn't on my list of novels that I will press upon friends and strangers.