The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross is the best use of science-fiction, the real world and fantasy since Magic Kingdom For Sale/Sold
Miriam Beckstein is a freelance business journalist. When here adoptive mother drops off a box of stuff that her birth mother (who died when Miriam was an infant) left for her, Miriam finds herself transported to a middle ages world and stuck in the middle of a family she didn’t know she had and might not want. In this second world, her extended family is a rich clan that helps the nobility by using their world jumping ability to transport messages across country (jump from medieval world to real world, jump on a jet, jump back to medieval world to deliver message). The family also uses their world jumping ability to transport drugs, further enriching them.
Later, Miriam finds a path to yet a third world which is in the 1800s and the story branches out. Miriam uses a laptop computer, generator and a CD of patents from the 1800s to start creating inventions in this third world. By gaging their technology level, Miriam is able to find a patent that is a slight improvement and make start a factory to churn out the new technology. This allows Miriam the ability to make money in a new, interesting and legal manner which would give her extended family a new power and financial base. But internal politics and an offshoot of the family that is settled in this third world, dash Miriam’s dreams. When Miriam is on the losing end of a family power struggle and the nobility decide that the clan is more trouble than they are worth, the politics start getting dirty.
The economic advantages of world jumping is an interesting idea. I can’t recall any other books that explicitly deal with the financial advantages of jumping between worlds with different levels of technology. The plot dealing with that is interesting and fun. The plot dealing with the war with the nobility and the internal family politics gets boring by the 3rd book and start dragging the series down. As the series is having it’s sixth book released, I wonder how much better the series would have been as a trilogy with the family politics and nobility war reduced significantly.
I agree completely that this series gets worse with each book, and I didn’t bother buying the 5th one. Stross has insisted, pretty much from the beginning, that this series is science fiction and not fantasy. I think it would have worked better if he hadn’t worried about the science stuff, but had concentrated on the plotting and economics. (It is interesting to see Paul Krugman’s name on the cover providing a blurb)