Minor Thoughts from me to you

The Revolution Trade
by Charles Stross

My rating: ★★☆☆☆
Read From: 17 October 2013—26 November 2013

This should be the exciting conclusion to Stross's Merchant Princes series. But it's not. I found myself losing interest shortly after I started the book and it took me a while to actually finish it. I kept hoping that it'd be better than it was.

The main problem was that this book seemed to contain a lot more cardboard cutout characters than the previous two did. Stross turned Vice-President Cheney into even more of a one-dimensional villain than he already had been. He also sidelined or killed the story's more interesting characters and featured the less interesting ones.

The Revolution Trade shifted the focus towards the interworld conflicts and firefights. The development economics and interworld trade that made the first two stories so interesting were sidelined. The story ended with a literal bang that completely overwhelmed my suspension of disbelief.

Because it focused on much less interesting character dynamics and much less intelligent plot points, I found the book to be a disappointing end to a series that started out well.