Empire Games by Charles Stross

You know you’re in for a complicated read when the first thing you read in a new novel is a summary of four different timelines and a synopsis of key characters.

For although this is the first book in a new series, the situation and the characters are from Charles’ Merchant Princes series.

Empire Games is a book that takes espionage, spy novels and The Cold War and then makes them….  something else. It is as we expect of Stross’s novels – complex, thoughtful, entertaining.

The setting of the novel is clever, with each of the four main time lines (there are others) being different. Timeline One is a radioactive Earth, made so in 2003 by rich merchant traders who can travel across the time lines – the Clan – in a vicious civil war. The effect of this is that the remnants of the Clan have spread to other time lines.

Time Line Two, for example, had the President of the United States assassinated by the Clan in 2003 with a stolen nuclear weapon. The result of this, at the time of this book in the 2020’s, is a highly restricted, paranoid world with surveillance a norm and the threat of Clan terrorists frequently used by President Rumsfeld (yes, that Rumsfeld)  as a means of social control.  It is a place of intense monitoring, global fear, curfews, network surveillance and drones.

Time Line Three is a world where England was invaded by France in 1760 and the British Crown was exiled to the New England colonies in America. There was no American War of Independence, nor a French or Russian Revolution. In 2003 the New British Empire’s Radical Party declared a democratic Commonwealth. The New American Commonwealth is now emerging as globally important but in a world where they are barely industrialised, though admittedly catching up quickly. This is partly due to the remnants of the Clan from Time Line One being brought there by Miriam Beckstein, where they now live in exile, and are uplifting the Commonwealth against the French. Miriam and her husband Erasmus are now part of the Commonwealth government at a level of development equivalent to our 1950’s.

Time Line Four is the most mysterious, but strange things are clearly happening. Here the seemingly-uninhabited world is in the grip of an ice-age across Europe and most of North America.

Following a densely layered, Stross plot filled with ideas is never easy, and it is also true here. You do need to understand all of that before reading this book. Most of the plot in Empire Games occurs in Time Line Two and Time Line Three.

The focus of the book is with Rita Douglas, on Time Line Two. She is the descendant of a family who can worldwalk – travel between the different timelines. Realising that genetically she has the power to worldwalk and could take the covert Cold War to the Clan in Time Line Three, the FBI persuade her to train as a spy. Much of the plot is about this – her training and the power games that are clearly happening around Rita when it is realised that she is an asset. The book conveys her confusion and assimilation into her new occupation as she makes sorties into Time Line Three.

At the same time Miriam wrestles with slowly introducing new technology into society and the infrastructure to support it.

The complexity is that we have all the accoutrements of a Cold War spy novel but with the added complication of running across four timelines. Unlike a typical Cold War novel, there is an added interest in that the reader doesn’t know what is happening here. There is a real chance, as has happened before on Time Line One, that things could turn very nasty very quickly, and Stross does well to reflect that Cold War paranoia in the setting. To complicate things further, Time Lines Two and Three each battles internal conspiracies, each potentially disastrous. Much of the story hangs on the issue of which world will be the aggressor – and whether Rita have to choose a side.

If you like the spy novels of Ian Fleming, or Len Deighton, as I do, but also appreciate a genre twist, then you’ll love Empire Games. It is intelligent, entertaining and yet also a little scary. Stross manages to make this an alternate history that reflects the troubled times we’re currently involved in. Rita’s character echoes this confusion – she’s smart and yet at the same time unclear as to what’s going on. It is obvious that she is capable of making up her own mind, and although this hasn’t happened yet, what she decides in the future will have major consequences.

There’s a lot in Empire Games to like, though I suspect I would have enjoyed it even more if I had known of the characters more than I did. There are things that happen that are meant to be important, but meant little to me without the emotional investment that would have been created by following the longer story. I can see that by being apparently dropped into the middle of a bigger plot, entertaining though it was, it might mean that some readers find this book as a stand-alone difficult to empathise with. It also doesn’t help that the ‘ending’, such as it is, depends on an emotional denouement that means less to a reader who has only read this first book. It is not really an ending, but a setting up of events for the next part of the story, something that will annoy some readers expecting at least a little closure.

Despite this, there’s a lot more positives than negatives here. Empire Games is a challenge, but a worthwhile one. It won’t be for everyone, but there’s a lot to enjoy if you’re up to it.

Empire Games by Charles Stross

Published by Tor Books, January 2017.

336 pages

ISBN: 978 150 9814 862

Review by Mark Yon

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