Empire Games

Charles Stross

09 August 2018
9781509864805
804 pages

Synopsis

A time of ambition, treachery and dangerous secrets . . .

Rita Douglas is plucked from her dead-end job and trained as a reluctant US spy. All because she has the latent genetic talent to hop between alternate timelines - and infiltrate them. Her United States is waging a high-tech war, targeting assassins who can move between worlds to deliver death on a mass scale, and Rita will be their secret weapon.

Miriam Beckstein has her own mission, as a politician in an industrial revolution US. She must accelerate her world's technology before their paranoid American twin finds them. It would blow them to hell. After all, they've done it before. Each timeline also battles internal conspiracies, as a cold war threatens to turn white hot. But which world is the aggressor - and will Rita have to choose a side?

This new series is set in the same world as Charles Stross' 'Merchant Princes' series.

Stross's ferociously imaginative world-building is on full display here . . . few other writers can match him for humour, creativity and sheer density of ideas
Shocks, surprises, reversals, and elaborations keep tumbling from Stross's nimble fingers . . . . These books are immense fun
One of the defining phenomena of twenty-first century SF is Charles Stross, for the quality of his work at its best