Dark State

Delightful and brilliant. Probably the best of the entire series so far. Stross manages to be to scathing, hilarious, insightful, and even tender.

There's not a ton of action for much of the book, it's more like the slow burn of a classic cold war spy thriller, but absolutely riveting, and dripping with suspense. There are spies, conspiracies, plans, plots, schemes, overtures, interrogations, double-crosses, tragic misunderstandings, catastrophic errors, and political machinations galore.

There's a lot going on, but it all builds on what's come before and the pieces fit together to create a cohesive plot. There's also more attention paid to the characters and their relationships, which too often received short shrift in the earlier books.

This second (or eighth) novel in Stross's Merchant Princes universe is continuing the new and interesting tack that began in Empire Games.

First of all, some background. There's three alternate timelines and world-walkers, jaunters, and on our timeline, there's now tech that allows us to hop timelines and possibly exploit entire green Earths, not just the three inhabited ones.

All of this gets very sticky because we have a super-paranoid State, the United States of a slightly different our world that suffered a nuclear attack on the White House in a previous book, complete with near absolute surveillance. We have another timeline where the Merchant Princes were overthrown and a different United States (called the Commonwealth) is stealing show more tons of tech and trying to avoid the cultural upheavals related to it, trying to catch up and protect itself from an invading and/or espionage-heavy US. And then there's a Germanic empire that never ended but is a good hundred years behind the other two.

Collision.

Actually, this is pretty much a straight Spy-Fiction novel with a fantastic base and multiple settings and very detailed historical references, inferences, and alternate timelines, all of which are explored and taken to their natural conclusions in a very smart, very impressive way.

Two timelines have nuclear power and deep distrust with each other, and they share the same soil. That's pretty wicked.

This book ramps up those concerns even as we get to know all the players better. The tension only gets worse with shifting political tides in the Commonwealth and a real tangle with lies and statecraft with the old empire. It's an impressively thought-out tangle, and anyone with a thought to intrigue and alternate worlds really ought to pick up this series. :) show less

This is the second book of a trilogy, but also number eight of a nine-book series. There are many timelines for Earth, each with a different history. A few people have the ability to teleport between timelines. The book mainly stays with two timelines in the year 2020. Timeline Two is like ours, up to 2003 when a worldwalker set off a nuclear weapon in the White House. Timeline Three diverged in about 1745, and had until recently been split between a English despotism in the Western Hemisphere and a French one in Eurasia; in 2003 a new democracy was born in Three's Western Hemisphere, which now faces dual threats from both the French regime and the paranoid USA of Timeline Two. Everyone has lots of nuclear weapons. Rita Douglas, a show more worldwalker from the USA, is pushed by Homeland Security into a fraught relationship with her biological mother, Miriam Burgeson, in the new Western democracy. Meanwhile an earlier, powerful human civilization was eliminated from the timelines thousands of years ago - by whom?

All this is not really hard to follow; Stross provides summaries and dramatis personae at the front. You still should start the trilogy with [Empire Games], which I reviewed in 2018. Stross is having fun imagining how spy tradecraft might work across multiple timelines, and how a really intensive panopticon surveillance society would work in a USA that knows a nuclear weapon could appear out of nowhere at any time. An impressive early chapter shows a spy nabbed by Homeland Security, which turns every computer-based device over a city block against her. Having had only 9-11-2001 in our actual timeline, that can't happen here yet, but nothing Stross imagines of such technology is impossible. The plot ramps up steadily and the books ends on a triple cliffhanger, to be concluded in Invisible Sun - which awaits on my TBR.

Stross also includes a 25 page appendix wherein he has a lot of fun outlining how Timeine Two's New American Commonwealth originated. You see, Bonnie Prince Charlie... show less

Tremendous amounts of fun! We get all the things I hoped for: More cool grandpa, more cool Rose, more cool girlfriend, (also otherwise cool women, especially the Princess seems to rock), and more cultural juxtaposition. The evil guy within the Commonwealth isn't … openly evil? I'm not even sure which side of their story I beliefe yet. And then we get dropped a huge cliffhanger on us (Princess missing, Kurt about to visit the Commonwealth, Adam The First Man dead) that is straight up illegal in the EU. Good thing the UK is seceding I guess.

Picking right up where Empire Games left off, Rita the world-walker is back in her home America. Her handlers are slightly disturbed that she was picked up so quickly and the message that she has returned with has allsorts of ominous overtones. The politics of that country are beginning to crack as the health of the leader reaches a certain point, and Miriam Burgeson sees that there might be an opportunity to get a high-profile defector on her side and diffuse the situation.

After an intense debriefing and an all to short reunion with her lover, Rita is sent back into the other America to begin negotiations with Miriam; to be wrong-footed totally as she reveals that she is Rita's mother. Another group from Rita's world have discovered show more another timeline with what looks to be the remains of another civilisation. Quite an advanced civilisation too, but their presence there has been noticed by the very thing that destroyed who was there before.

To say this is fast-paced would be an understatement, I crashed through this in very little time at all, so much so that I almost went flying past the cliffhanger(s) at the end of the book. He neatly tied up some of the threads up from Empire Games but has blown the whole lot open now for the third book. The multiple plots duck and dive and intertwine making this sharp and spikey mash-up of a sci-fi and espionage thriller a great read. Stross has added a political dimension to it too with the interplay between the states in Miriam's world, and the manoeuvring that is taking place in Rita's world. The third is looking like it is going to be great. show less

Politics, politics and more politics. There's a little bit of spy thriller in here too, but not enough. Stross seems to be trying to convince us that his not-quite-Earth alternate timeline is better than the slightly future Earth (the book is set in 2020 but was written in 2017) of our timeline, but does a poor job of it. This book doesn't have either the action or discovery aspects of the previous books, so gets bogged down into political maneuvering.

More readable than [Empire Games] the latest in the Merchant Princes multiple worlds bounces between equally depressing Time line 2(us) & Time line 3 with Time line 1 refugees. #2 & #3 don't seem to either have much to recommend them, and while we may have some sympathy for a few of the characters, they really aren't a bunch of charmers. And the number of cliff hangers seems excessive.