The Hidden Family: Book Two of Merchant Princes (Merchant Princes, 2)

by Charles Stross

Book Overview

The second volume of Charles Stross's thrill-a-minute saga of multiple worlds Miriam, a hip tech journalist from Boston, discovered her alternate world relatives in The Family Trade , and with them an... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765352052
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Tor Fantasy
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.7" x 0.9" x 4.2"

Customer Reviews

!ping! fulfills promise of book one

Stross delivers. Book One The Family Trade (Merchant Princes) dropped us short and here is the rest. The protagonist is harried, exhausted, chased, probed and nearly run to ground several times. Along the way (as you might imagine), she decides she can't trust anyone. At the same time, the situation forces her to chose friends and get things done, for just hiding will not save her from the actions of others. A good premise executed very well. None of the 'rough author voice' of Book One. Still some bad edits by the publisher. Certain passages just don't make sense because of missing words or sentences. More villains appear, more friends, more danger than Book One and messy action (very real in feeling.) There's not much tidy about this adventure and a few "kicks to the head" for the female protagonist as things finally resolve. Very good read. (About six hours if you are caught up in it.)

Very good part two.

I won't give up any spoilers, but - lets say, I was suprised by what happened in this part of the series. All in all, part two was a good book with more trips and tricks and all that you expect from Charles. Glad you are working on the next one already!

Wanna Buy a Tubeless Tire?

Charles Stross is a true genre bender. Just when you think you've got him pegged he goes off in a different direction. Often several ways at once. Stross is one of those authors who has a good idea and promptly writes a book about it. And if it works out, he writes another book and makes a series of it. The Merchant Princes explores the idea of inter-dimensional travel, from, of all things, a business perspective. In the first volume, The Family Trade, freelance journalist Miriam Beckstein discovers that she isn't Miriam Beckstein, but Helge Thorvold-Hjorth, a member of a clan in another dimension that has discovered how to travel to our own, and have set up a drug dealing business in order to buy goodies for their otherwise primitive, barely post-feudal, lifestyle. Think medieval mafia and you will have the big picture. In between various attempts on her life Miriam realizes that the Thorvold-Hjorth business model has reached its limits and she sets off, credit card in hand to make money where no journalist has gone before. Hence this novel, The Hidden Family. Miriam, in the process of trying to discover who is plotting against her, discovers that there is more than one plot afoot. Somebody else besides the Clan can trip the dimensions fantastic and this new group has discovered an entirely new world of their own, something of a combination of an early 19th Century lifestyle with a good deal of modern science mixed in. Call it techno-Gothic. With three worlds before her, Miriam quickly realizes the opportunities for profit and sets about making a large profit while dodging assassins and plots to wrest her position and power away from her. This is a great story, but it has some severe believability problems. The most glaring of this is how easy it is for Miriam to set up as an entrepreneur in a world that frowns on women doing much more than child-bearing and tatting. Especially when her stock in trade are things like advanced automobile breaks. Going in the other direction her plan is to track down artworks that were lost in this world, but still exist in the other. It seems to me that setting up in business as a rediscoverer of lost masterpieces is bound to attract a lot of unwelcome attention. However, if you can manage the willing suspension of disbelief, this is an interesting story that is completely different from run-of-the-mill dimension hopping. Miriam is tough and determined to succeed, and if she doesn't get caught, she is destined to be a billionaire. Now how often do you get to read a series about a billionaire journalist?

A charming British voice

Before I jump into the review, I have to point out that one of the other reviewers attributed the Riverworld series to Roger Zelazny -- wrong, it was Philip Jose Farmer who wrote the Riverworld books. I have become a fan of Charles Stross, and have now read all five of the novels (which I am aware of) that he has in print. He definitely knows how to grab the reader (at least this reader!). I liked this particular book better than I liked The Family Trade. The Family Trade seemed to me to start out awkwardly. I have done some (so far uncommercial) writing myself, and I have noticed something I think of as the "transition point" -- before this point, I feel like I'm just making stuff up, while after this point, I feel like it's all real and the characters and the situation are forcing things in a certain direction. The Family Trade felt like Stross "just making up stuff" almost halfway through. If I hadn't read others of his before this one, I might have given it up as a loss. The second half certainly took off! The Hidden Family, of course, started out without this problem, the characters and the main background having been already set up in the first book. I liked the way Stross thickened the plot by bringing in another alternate world along with the long-lost kinfolk, as well as the intrigue etc. (no spoilers here!). Others have commented on the realism of the pre-modern settings, Stross' grasp of factors that many fantasy authors tend to ignore, and so on. I have only one minor (very minor!) quibble, and that is the fact that Stross writes like an Englishman, and sometimes his American characters don't sound American to me at all! There is one sequence in the story where one character is telling the other to "come on!," and I kept hearing it in my mind's ear as "COME on," rather than the American "come ON." I suppose it came out like that because of the surrounding dialogue etc. As I said, this is very minor (most readers probably would never notice), and won't keep me from buying his next novel in hardcover, the minute it comes out.

Fulfills the promise of the previous book in this series

The first of the Merchant Princes books was largely devoted to setting up the characters and establishing the background. With the second book, Stross shifts into high gear, with Miriam now setting up a business and becoming involved in subversive politics on world three while juggling family intrigues on the world of the Merchant Princes. As with the first book, "The Hidden Families" manages to recall Zelazny's Amber series without seeming derivative. The conclusion is more satisfactory than the first volume, in that some matters are actually resolved, but there is still plenty of meat for future books in the series. It is a rather slim volume, just over 300 pages of fairly large type, and the story moves fast, so it is over far too soon. I can only hope that Stross keeps them coming at regular intervals.