The Hidden Family
Charlie Stross
309 pages
published in 2005

The Merchant Princes series is Charlie's attempt at writing a fat fantasy series. Unfortunately, the rules changed shortly after he had written the first book in the series, with bookstores no longer wanting fat fantasies. Hence what should've been the first book was split in two, The Family Trade and The Hidden Family each hastily rewritten to stand on their own. This wasn't entirely succesful, especially in the first book; the best way to read these two novels is back to back and pretend it's still one novel. As it is, you have The Family Trade setting up some plot threads which are only resolved in The Hidden Family; read them on their own and you only have half a novel. A pity, but nothing to be done about that.

In The Family Trade we met Miriam Bernstein, journalistic investigator for a IT/biotech trade journal, who stumbled on something far greater than the already impressive whitewashing operation she tought she had uncovered. She's fired, her house is broken into and she's almost kidnapped, but then she discovers she can transport herself to a parallel world. It turns out she's a lost member of a family of worldwalkers, who were also behind that whitewashing operation that got her into trouble in the first place. Though she's understandably reluctant to do so, Miriam slowly accepts her new family and her own role in keeping the family business --smuggling drugs absolutely undetectably into the United States by running it through their homeworld to make money to buy medcines and luxury goods not available there and selling those to the nobility-- afloat. Once she does, she sees some opportunities for drastically modernising the family; The Hidden Family takes up the rest of the story.

As I said, originally these two books were originally written as one, but rewritten and split in two before publication. On the whole this worked well, but there was one little scene in The Family Trade that didn't fit in with the rest of the story. In fact, it didn't even seem to take place in either our world or the world of the families, which is of course a big clue. As any science fiction fan would immediately assume, if you have two parallel worlds, odds are they're not the only ones and it comes as little surprise that The Family Trade introduces us to this world. Much more advanced than the pseudo-medieval world of her family, but still less so than "our world", it's a sort of steampunk version of an America where the United States never happened. Instead there's New Britain, still an absolute monarchy, though one under threat of Levellers and Diggers and other radicals.

Miriam discovers all this the hard way, because at the close of the previous book she was nearly assasinated by what looked like a rival gang of world walkers, which is clearly impossible as only the family has that ability and it doesn't breed true. So where do they come from? The answer is a typical bit of Strossian cleverness, both obvious and surprising.

Charlie Stross has a bit of a reputation as a cutting edge science fiction writer whose novels you migh bounce off hard, if you're not as into science fiction as he is. With the The Merchant Princes however this is not at all the case. This is written for a broad audience, for everybody who likes a nice long fantasy series. Not to worry though, as all the ususal little Stross touches are still there, just slightly muted.

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Charles Stross, The Hidden Family, science fiction, book review