BOOKS: The Family Trade, Charles Stross (2004)

"Book One of The Merchant Princes."

That's what it says on the cover. More accurately, this is Book One-Half; the volume ends abruptly in mid-story, without even the slightest attempt to provide resolution of anything. It's an annoying trend in SF and fantasy publishing in recent years.

It's one thing if you're planning a multi-volume mega-series, like that interminable monstrosity Robert Jordan continues to crank out, but this is clearly half of a single novel that is being published in two volumes in order to get twice as much money from the reader. And it's not so thick a book -- about 300 pages -- that doubling it would create an impractically large volume.

Aside from my frustrations about packaging and commercialism, though, this is a most entertaining book that provides a few novel twists on one of the standard fantasy tropes. Once again, our hero is magically transported to an alternate Earth where society has not progressed quite so far as it has here -- roughly medieval, in this case -- and finds that knowledge from our world may be the key to survival.

Among the twists: Miriam Beckstein's jumps from our world to the other are controllable; she simply has to gaze into a locket to make the trip. In fact, "world-walking" is taken for granted in the other world. That's not to say that everyone can do it; it is a hereditary skill, found principally in the royal families.

That sets up our next interesting variation: OtherEarth (I'm going to call it that; I don't believe it's ever given a name) isn't entirely a medieval society; the ruling class lives, unknown to the mass of peasants, a very comfortable and relatively modern existence, funded by the family business. That business involves a lot of jumping between worlds, and it is essentially an import/export business.

There's a lot of political struggle among the ruling families of OtherEarth, and Miriam finds herself in the thick of it; seems that she's the long-lost daughter of a deceased countess, and her reappearance stands to upset the financial plans of several relatives who have been managing her family's financial and political affairs.

Stross has one more interesting change on the formula for us. Generally, the poor schmo who finds himself in another world is utterly ill-equipped to deal with it; he's often not that bright to begin with, and certainly doesn't have any specialized knowledge that would help him cope. Miriam, on the other hand, is a smart woman who deals with the situation intelligently, testing the parameters of her locket's ability; not only that, she's a financial journalist, and knowledge of financial and economic systems may be just what OtherEarth needs.

I look forward to reading part two, The Hidden Family, and Stross has dropped some interesting hints about what will happen there (I'm pretty sure there's at least one more alternate world to be visited). I'd still have been happier, though, if the thing had been published as one novel in the first place.