Shooting At Midnight Is A Good Book

Or why you should read Shooting at Midnight by Greg Rucka

Shooting at Midnight is the fourth book in the Atticus Kodiak series of books... kind of. The book stars Bridgett Logan, a badass private detective with a chip on her shoulder who is a sometime love interest of Mr. Kodiak, as she is dragged into the darkest cesspools of her past. In the novel, Bridgett is approached by a friend from her past with a single request: to help her kill her abusive, drug dealing ex-boyfriend. Bridgett agrees to help, setting off a chain of events that drags her into the track-marked underbelly of the heroin trade and pits her against one of New York's biggest druglords.

Shooting at Midnight is distinct from the rest of the Kodiak series for reasons beyond the change in protagonist; it is more of a crime/noir piece than a suspense thriller. Instead of grand action set pieces arranged with engineered precision, we have a much more intimate, slow moving beast. It's a book that grabs you and drags with it as it creeps into ever darker recesses of the human experience; a book that slowly grinds down its characters as it progresses to its brutal conclusion. As a result, Shooting at Midnight is everything I want from a Noir experience: it's relentless, and desperate, and disgusting and filled with human drama. It's horrible and great and I couldn't put it down.

But I think that description still misses the spark of what makes the book more than just a superbly executed noir piece. I have a friend much smarter than me who argues that fiction is essentially an empathy engine. It grabs us as readers and allows us to see inside someone else's mind and to experience life from another perspective. And in living as this other person we learn to relate to them and care for their needs and viewpoint.  It's a kind of magic. The best fiction makes us live with, understand, and empathize with people very different from us while still telling a compelling and entertaining/fascinating story. I think Shooting at Midnight is an example of this kind of fiction.

Let me explain. A lot of Shooting at Midnight is constructed around the heroin trade and drug addiction. Frankly, I find hard drugs disgusting and addiction to be one of the most alien and terrifying aspects of being human. I genuinely cannot fathom an all consuming need for something that so completely derails a person's priorities and life. I'm not sure anyone who hasn't experienced it can really understand it. Add the fact that, while my heart certainly goes out to them, most of my interactions with the drug addicts in my community are fairly unpleasant and I have a difficult time empathizing with them. (Also, despite thinking that way more should be done to help addicts and thinking criminal prosecution of users is counter productive and kind of a shitty thing to do, I can't quite shake that little voice that blames addicts for trying drugs in the first place... I mean, I know social pressures and cycles of poverty certainly play a tremendous role in drug addiction, but I know too many people who have escaped abuse and poverty cleanly to believe it's a zero sum game free of culpability.) I think one of the most powerful aspects of Shooting at Midnight is that it manages to drag me into this world in a really effective way that makes me relate to and approach an understanding with a group of people whose lives are so foreign to my own. It broadens my worldview a bit and makes me question my preconceived notions. And that is a kind of magic. 

(Also, the prelude to this book is fucking brilliant. It's five pages that tells you who the protagonist is and seamlessly establishes the contract of the novel. It's also an absolutely gutting bit of prose.)

(Also, also, Shooting at Midnight, as a pun, is just black as hell.)

Eye On Hawkeye #9

Or my apparently regular feature gushing about Matt Fraction, David Aja and Matt Hollingsworth's Hawkeye because this book is perfect.

Hawkeye #9 continues the trend of exceptionally good comics. As usual the writing by Matt Fraction is this effortless and frequently hilarious delight (Mostly! see warning...), the linework by David Aja is gorgeous and thoughtful, and the colours by Matt Hollingsworth are stylistic and, as I am beginning to appreciate more, just as cerebral and integral to the visual identity of the book as any other aspect of it. And a new issue means a new wonky blog post on some aspect of the smart creative decisions made by the some part of the creative team.

(Also: Warning Hawkeye #9 contains FEELS. Do not read it will operating heavy machinery, in a public space, or while emotionally distraught. Side effects include gasps, sobs, and mild profanity. Feels!)

As per usual I'm writing this in a way that gives all of the credit to one member of a hyper-collaborative collective of creators and so I might miscredit someone accidentally. If so, the most apologies. (Also, apologies to Matt Hollingsworth for greyscaling his great colours to make my diagrams. A big long colourist intensive essay is brewing, I swear.) I'm trying to avoid the big reveals and moments in this issue, but you should go into this knowing that there will still be slight *SPOILERS*.

David Aja is, I think, one of the most cerebral artists working in mainstream comics. As good looking as his artwork is, I think what makes his work really remarkable is the ways he uses composition to provide additional layers of storytelling. One of the tools in his quiver is the way he frequently takes into account the vision path of readers and frequently designs his compositions in ways that guide the eye of the reader through the page. Hawkeye #9 has some great examples of this.

Comics are a visual medium, and as such rely on vision and human eyeballs to work. This is not just a self-evident statement because human vision is built around a series of predictable behaviours. Whether learned or just intrinsic to how our brains have evolved to use visual information, our eyes are automatically drawn to certain things. Like, you know when you see a sudden motion right in the corner of your peripheral vision (especially when you're wearing headphones) and your eyes instantly jerk over to focus on the source of that motion? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about, but, you know, in a static medium. David Aja is a master at hacking these visual behaviours to create pathways for our eyes to move through the artwork. Particularly in the absence of dialogue.

This sequence from the "Natasha: The Work Wife" section of the comic is a great example of this kind of guiding-the-eye composition:

In the first panel, we see Penny running and looking to the right. Our vision follows the direction she is looking (we want to see what she sees). This brings us directly to Natasha vaulting the suitcases in the second panel where her outstretched arm points and directs us to the top of the third panel. In this panel our eyes get drawn along the lines of the banister, follow the curve of the stairwell (how cool is that!?) and arrow straight in on Penny running down the subway platform. 

What this collectively does is increase the speed at which we can experience the page. Instead of tracking around ourselves trying to find key details, our vision is guided to the most critical parts of the page. And this in turn adds a sense of urgency in this page that thematically matches its chase scene contents. 

Great, right?

Here's another great bit of visual guidance from the "Bobbi: The ex-wife" chunk of the story. Bro. :

In the first panel our eyes are instantly drawn to the blue boot, and follow along the trajectory of apparent motion and into the top of the second panel. Here, our eyes track down the arc formed by the Uzi submachine gun, the Bro's arm, and the steering wheel/lettering into the third panel where the arc is continued by the front bumper and ends in the fire hydrant and final sound effect. 

Again, this page guidance speeds up the events in this page and makes them see to occur all in a moment, despite being spread over three panels. Even more impressively, the long arc in panels two and three manages to simulate the motion of the Bro steering hard to the right making the van veer hard to the right too. This makes the pathway of vision match the motion of events so that reader actually experiences the movement. Not only that, but the fact that the arc, and therefore the visual movement, ends in the van crashing adds extra emotional weight to the collision. 

The way the lettering, by Chris Eliopoulus presumably, enhances this visual tracking is also super impressive. Come to think of it, the use of bright blue for the boot  and red for the fire hydrant makes these key visual elements extra eye catching too, which is an example of Matt Hollingworth's colours enhancing the effect of visual tracking as well. Collaboration!

This little bit here from the "Kate: Kate" section of the comic has another cool bit of visual tracking magic:

This collection of panels has TWO distinct visual guide paths by my estimation. In the first panel our eyes are drawn along Kate's outstretched leg in to the second panel where we jog right, fail to see her where we expect to, which pulls our vision down to a ducking Kate (this is enhanced by the path made by the Bro's shoulders), which then sets us up for the upward explosion of Kate's knee into the Bro's Bros and ends in the collision (for extra impact). This is the visual path describing Kate's motion. There is a second path made by the half formed arch of the Bro's swinging bat (our eyes automatically try to follow motion paths). This is the bros visual pathway. 

Individually, both paths create urgent, quick paths to navigate the panels. These paths, like the other examples, create a sense of speed and urgency to the page and also adds a level of continuity and reader experience to the motions described by them. The fact that there are two competing visual pathways adds a swirling, chaotic feel to the events that increases the visual tension to the brawl depicted. And, this might be a stretch, but the fact that in the panel where the Bro gets sacked he lacks his own visual path might be designed to show that his initiative in this fight is over.

Of course, great story telling is also present where the panels do not have a direct visual continuity path. And this can be used to highlight action. Take this panel that comes immediately after the third panel described above, but on the corner of the page in the row of panels below it:

The fact that this panel does not connect with the other panels makes it surprising and distinct which adds extra weight to the headbutt. Also, the fact that we are quickly swinging our vision across the page in a carriage-return actually simulates the motion of a headbutt: it's very quick, and is a blind motion that ends with this image of impact. Which is pretty cool.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that David Aja is a really great artist and that Hawkeye #9 is a really great comic.

But one with FEELS! So many FEELS!

FEELS Elephant, by Matt Fraction

So I Read The Love And Rockets: Locas Omnibuses

Or a 250 word (or less) review of Maggie the Mechanic, The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., Perla la Loca, Penny Century, and Esperanza,
By Jaime Hernandez, Fantagraphics Books

Love and Rockets is maybe the most revered comic of my favourite comics writers. And wow you guys, Jaime Hernandez's chunk of it is one amazing, strange, and difficult to explain comic. As much as one can categorize the Locas comics, I'd say these comics are about Maggie and Hopey, a couple of young punk rockers who are friends and sometime lovers growing up in the LA Hispanic punk scene. The comics follow the adventures of these young women and their colorful friends for literally THIRTY YEARS. Half a lifetime of stories where we get to watch these people grow from goofy teen punks to unsure adults as they struggle through life. It's a reading experience unlike any other I've had: it is absolutely it's own thing. There is a sensibility on display here that is interesting, charming, frequently hilarious, and completely outside my experience. An aesthetic that involves punk rockers, female Mexican wrestling, strippers, Barrio gangs, lesbians, and even super heroes. But an aesthetic that is always built around love and beauty and family and relationships. It's at once gloriously strange and wonderfully familiar. I think, maybe, that the real magic of the Locas comics is just how effortless and alive it feels. Love and Rockets: Locas seems less like a manufactured work of art and more of a spontaneous reality filled with unbridled humanity. It's absolutely incredible and completely the masterpiece that everyone says it is. It's a must read for everyone the slightest bit enthusiastic about comics. 

Word count: 250

Things I Worry About: The Ethics of Sharing Media

Or things I would love to have answers to.

Being a geek is essentially a confluence of weird enthusiasm for certain commodities and sharing that enthusiasm and those commodities with other people. In my geekiness I am quite fond of sharing my favourite media with anyone who is interested (who is also responsible with my belongings). A lot of this is an attempt to suck coworkers and friends into my swirling vortex of nerdery. It's also a calculated effort to recruit new readers to comics, because more readers mean a bigger market and a bigger market means more and better comics for us all to choose from. The trouble is, I think there are some ethical questions about the indiscriminate sharing of media.

As tempting as it is to view comics and nerd media as a marketplace, it fails to appreciate how important creators, those wizards who actually make our chosen fictions, are to the existence of nerd media. These people absolutely need to be compensated for their creativity and should ideally be able to earn a comfortable livelihood from their work. And for this to happen people have to not only read, say, a comic book, but have to actually pay for it. Every time I lend a friend a comic they get to read it without actually paying for it. It is for this reason that I worry about the ethics of lending.

Lending in it's most exaggerated sense is piracy which is patently not okay. Basically, piracy is a shadowy ersatz publishing machine designed to let people who specifically want something obtain it for free, but without supporting the production of that something in any way. People who share media via this mechanism, whether it be by uploading a new thing or by seeding existent things are stealing from the creators of that media and are actively hurting the industry that makes it. It's even a dubitable that piracy is a form of lending: peer to peer networks DUPLICATE media without affecting the lenders ability to enjoy the media.  Lenders in this system are able to take their single initial purchase and reproduce it endlessly in a way that lets them potentially give it to thousands or even millions of people. Basically, pirates get to eat their cake and give it to a million internet strangers. I would also argue that since piracy requires the active participation of pirates who have to hunt down what they are looking for, the vast majority of them are effectively CURRENT readers who therefore represent comics/novel/whatever market that has been lost. (Although, to be fair, it was a bootleg disk full of comics that got me into a comic store in the first place, which I think supports the notion of free trials being good for attracting new readers.) Regardless, I think piracy is a clearly unacceptable form of media lending. 

But what about the industrial lending of a public library? Is that okay? Libraries are easy: I think they are perfectly okay. They initially purchase books and pay a fee to publishers and creators for the right to temporarily lend media to the public. And I think libraries, beyond performing an essential public service, help the publishing industry by helping to turn young novice readers into life long readers. Moreover, at least half the novels I currently own are ones that I read first from a library and most of the rest are by authors whose work I first encountered there: the ability to try media in a legal and temporary framework that still compensates creators. Essentially, I think libraries are clearly okay.

What about legitimate secondary sales markets, like a used bookstore or the resale rack down the comic shop? The law on the matter states that at least for physical media, once the initial sale is made, the owner can effectively do with it what they will including resale. Which is to say, from a legal standpoint used bookstores are kosher. But just because something is legal doesn't make it ethical. A book bought used does not provide additional compensation to the creators or the publishing machinery that created the book. That said, a used book has ALREADY been bought once, and as such, compensation has occurred. Moreover, the original owner in selling their copy has forfeited their ability to enjoy that media which you are now acquiring. Although you are acquiring it for less than you might pay to get it new and in a way that compensates the creator directly. In a way a used book is both a legitimate sale and a lost sale to the creator. So it is without question a morally complicated marketplace.  But damned if it isn't one I kind of love. When I moved out of my parents house some years ago I used a great (and now dearly departed) used bookstore to convert a misspent youth of horrible fantasy and Science-fantasy pulp into the back catalogue of my favourite authors and some of my favourite books (once borrowed from a library). That ability to essentially convert books or to find out of print copies is pretty amazing. At the end of the day, I can't help but think that used bookstores are a kind of ethically neutral space. Maybe?

What about actually lending books to friends? By the same law that says reselling media is okay, it is legal to lend a book to a friend: once you own a book it's perfectly okay to share it around. That said, any person lent a book/comic/whatever gets to enjoy that media without having compensated the creator or production apparatus for that thing. Like piracy the lendee does not pay for their use of that media, and the lender only temporarily forfeits their own use of the media. But, like a used bookstore, there is only one, legally obtained copy of the media being circulated which only a single person can use at a time. The creators have already been compensated by the time of use. So where does that leave lending ethically?

I think the ethics of lending fall into two categories. If you lend something to someone who would otherwise purchase their own copy of media you are potentially denying a sale, and that is not so kosher. If you are lending media to someone who would not otherwise interact with that media than lending is perfectly fine. Better than fine in that the person being leant might enjoy the experience enough to actually go out and buy similar media and become a new consumer and fan. Also, I imagine that while creators want to be financially compensated for their work, that they might also enjoy an audience reading and enjoying their work regardless of compensation. Maybe? But yeah, I'm still kind of concerned by this.

Variety Is The Spice of Comics Pt. 3: Getting Your Friend's Hooked.

Or how variety in comics is amazing and generally a good idea.

I spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to get friends to try reading comics. Most of this stems from the fact that I really, really enjoy reading comics and want to share that experience with the people I care about (as any good geek should). Part of this is maybe also motivated by the fact that I don't really have any comic friends, so it would be cool to convert a friend or two. But on a far more mercenary level, I think convincing a friend to read, and to maybe even buy comics is important for comics as an industry.

Comics, as we try to avoid thinking about, are a commodity. Comics creators are a kind of artisan that produce a specialized commodity for a niche consumer. Publishing companies, some merely facets of giant multinational media empires, act as merchant/distributors and bring the commodity to a retailer (a comic shop/bookstore/web ap/whatever) who then sells the product to consumers. As much as creators, publishers, and retailers are all important cogs in the comics machine, there would not be a comics industry without consumers. (I mean, I'm sure some people would still make and share comics they made for fun... but business-driven professional comics require someone to eventually buy them.) To a certain extent, the pool of comics consumers, the market for the weird, amazing commodity that is comics, dictates how much comics can viably be made and supports the people that actually make the things we care about.

In that light, bringing in new comics readers increases the size of the comics market and, as such, increases the amount of money available to comics which thereby increases the amount of comics that can/will be produced and the amount of money that eventually reaches creators (who are great).  I know that in the years since a friend of mine slipped me a disk of bootleg comics in an Integral Calculus class I have spent THOUSANDS of dollars on comics and as such I have contributed to the continuance and manufacture of more comics. The way I figure it, every friend of mine I can convince to read and purchase comics represents money that is being fed into the comic machine that would otherwise not be there.

(And yes, my friends often liken me to a drug dealer.)

So back to convincing my friends and loved ones to try reading comics. I have found that most people are not interested in reading superhero comics. It's not that Superhero comics are stigmatized, really, it's that they are a known (or presumed to be known) quantity. Everyone thinks they know what Superhero comics are and has an opinion concerning whether or not they would like to read them. (And I would argue that everyone who is interested in reading superhero comics basically already is, and if they aren't, it isn't very hard for them to change that.) As a result, I have found that the trick to convincing people to try reading comics is to present them with the kind of smart, mature, well-written and beautifully drawn non-superhero comics that most people don't know or appreciate exist.

Almost universally, I have found that Y The Last Man is a perfect first comic to spring on the kind of people I am friends with. The comic has a very accessible and addictive script: it has a compelling central mystery and rolls out a relentless series of cliff hangers that keeps readers glued to the series. Moreover from a writing perspective, the comic manages to present extremely well realized, likeable characters, a snappy sense of humour, and a maturity and level of discourse that civilians are frequently surprised to find in comics. Paired with this is really accessible art: on the one hand it looks nice and services the story well and on the other it has a low panel count in conventional layouts and really doesn't experiment too much. Y The Last Man is also kind of the perfect length for a first comic reading experience. It's not so long that new readers burn out, but still long enough that they get to experience a fair amount of comics before reaching the end. Basically, Y The Last Man is a perfect storm of comics for new people. 

That said, in my experience everyone has a different taste in media and wants slightly different things from the experience of it. Part of what makes Y The Last Man such a powerful gateway comic, beyond its execution, is that it manages to straddle a lot of genres and emotional responses simultaneously. Everyone I have ever lent it to has enjoyed it, but frequently for slightly different reasons... and from those responses come critical information about what comes next. And this is where variety (and hence the title of this blog entry) comes in.

(That didn't take a long time to get to at all...)

One of the more successful comic conversions I've had is a coworker I'll call subject A (one that has actually resulted in a comics purchase!). With  this person I started with Phonogram which yielded pay dirt with The Singles Club but not Rue Britannia (which was too myopic for her). I then leant her Y The Last Man which she DEVOURED as fast as I would lend it to her. She then tried and enjoyed Scott Pilgrim, the output of Faith Erin Hicks, and Chew. She finally tried Julia Wertz's The Infinite Wait and Other Stories and was blown away and went and bought her first comic in Drinking at the Movies (well second comic, she gift-exchange-stole The Manhattan Projects: Science  Bad. at our work Xmas party). She is currently slowly working her way through the Runaways and Octopus Pie (which she quite enjoys). Basically, she likes fun, humorous  not super-intense comics that she can relate to.

A similar success story comes from a guy on my soccer teams... who I will call Subject 2. He too devoured Y The Last Man when I leant it to him. From there I tried giving him Chew... which he thought was too ridiculous and silly. So I leant him Criminal, which he apparently likes a lot and is slowly reading in fits and starts. While I am still figuring out what Subject 2 is really into, it seems he likes intense, realistic, page-turning comics.

Which is all proof that not everyone wants to read the same kind of comics. Moreover, it is evidence that the people who are not interested in Superhero comics immediately may be interested in other comics, and that finding what comics they like is mostly a matter of finding what genre of fiction they enjoy. And this is where variety comes in: the more KINDS of comics that are being made, the more likely a new reader will be able to find a comic that fits their media needs exactly (or the more likely I will find that perfect comic to force on my friends). 

To take this idea a step further, maybe the way we can expand the audience, and therefore the market, for comics is not by making better and better and better superhero comics, but by making ALL KINDS of different comics. That way everyone can find the comic they want to read. And who knows? Maybe that will lead to them trying a comic. 

And then another.

And another.

Previously:
Variety is the Spice of Comics Pt. 1: Pony Up
Variety is the Spice of Comics Pt. 2: Year in Review

So I Read Mystery Society

A 250 word (or less) review of the Mystery Society collected edition.

By Steve Niles and Fiona staples, IDW Publishing

Mystery Society is kind of like a Saturday morning cartoon in a beautiful comic package. The story follows young occult bookstore owners turned millionaire adventurers Nick and Anastasia Mystery as they set out to debunk urban legends and conspiracies. They are joined by a steampunk robot piloted by the brain of Jules Verne and Secret Skull, a lady who is also dead, and a pair of twin super-powered experimental subjects. Together they form the Mystery Society where they have run-ins within an out-of-control military industrial complex and hijinks ensue. The script by Steve Niles is pleasant enough, with a very happy-go-lucky retro-cartoon feel. It's clever, with some fun jokes and slight twists and is perfectly enjoyable. The real reason to read Mystery Society, though, is to gawk at Fiona Staples' art: it's absolutely gorgeous. The designs are delightful, the characters expressive, and everything is sumptuosly colored. The artwork is worth the price of admission. So if you want to read a remarkably beautiful comic book with a fun premise and a pleasantly well written script, check out Mystery Society.

Word count: 179

The Merchant Princes Series Are Good Books

Or why you should read The Family Trade, The Hidden Family, The Clan Corporate, The Merchants War, The Revolution Business, and The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross.

I have a fraught relationship with Fantasy. When I was younger I went through a phase where I devoured the genre: no book was too pulpy, goofy, or saccarine for my youthful palate. The result is that I gorged myself on a lot of, frankly, terrible books. And now I'm very wary of any Fantasy novel I encounter.

So it was with conflicted emotions that I learned that Charles Stross, a favourite author, wrote a six novel series of fantasy novels. I mean, I love Charles Stross' Science Fiction novels. They are exciting and interesting stories built around brilliant high concepts and absolutely packed with neat little ideas about the future, Science, or economics (which are all things that tickle me). And it's all executed with a kind of mad, nerdy glee that is, at the end of the day, fun. It's exactly the kind of smart and enjoyable reading experience I want from fiction. All of that said... I kind of planned on giving The Merchant Princes series a pass because they are Fantasy.

Except it was announced that three of Charles Stross' upcoming novels will be sequels to the existing six Merchant Princes novels.

This pretty much means I've got to read these books despite my misgivings. A trilogy is a pretty solid investment of time for a prose author, and I'm just not willing to go cold turkey on a new Stross novel for that long. Of course, I'm buoyed by the fact that Stross is an excellent writer and that he once decided that his Eschaton Sci-fi setting was irrevocably broken and abandoned it. And if he is unwilling to invest his time in what I still think is a perfectly serviceable Space Opera series, then it gives me confidence that The Merchant Princes books are worth checking out.

So I gave them a go.

In a broad sense The Merchant Princes novels follow a pretty traditional Fantasy trope. In them, Miriam Beckstein, a freshly unemployed tech journalist discovers she is secretly the noble heiress from a secret kingdom on another world after she meets her long lost relatives.  In The Merchant Princes there exist parallel worlds with divergent histories. Miriam's adopted home, a modern day America, exists in parallel proximity with Miriam's secret family home, a North America settled by feudal Nordic/Germanic settlers still living in a dark age. Miriam and her long lost family possess the hereditary ability to travel between worlds and have used this ability to become extremely wealthy merchants in the medieval version of America by taking advantage of modern America's infrastructure. Furthermore, with their amassed fortune and access to modern technology and weaponry Miriam's family have become very powerful in their native land. And now they want Miriam to come home with them and take up the life of a wealthy duchess she was always meant to have.

So at first blush, exactly the kind of Fantasy that I would rather avoid.

But here is the brilliance of The Merchant Princes: they attack this sugary and stale premise with the grim, grinding reality of the situation. Stross mercilessly points out what it would mean to be suddenly dragged into a medieval society ruled by feudal politics. Instead of being a wonderful adventure, these novels portray what it is like for a modern woman to be transported to a time where marriages are an arranged political institution, having children is an expected way to consolidate power, and where the toilet is a pot or a hole in the wall. Not to mention a whole slough of other things too spoilery to mention. Add to that a really thorough exploration of how the politics and economics of world walking would work in a really smart and wankery way that, I think, really fleshes out the premise. Basically, The Merchant Princes is an intensely thoughtful, unabashedly cynical and mature take on a really silly Fantasy staple. Which is kind of awesome.

(Or more put more succinctly The Merchant Princes are like what if Narnia was a real place that was shit.)

The Merchant Princes is also pretty interesting from a feminist perspective. It sets out a pretty strident look at the genuinely shitty way women were treated historically. To a certain extent this functions as a lesson for how far they have come in our modern age, but also, maybe, how far they have yet to go and what they stand to lose if they don't defend their rights. But beyond that, The Merchant Princes make some really clever use of our preconceptions about women that makes for some neat twists in the story but also functions to highlight some of the dismissive and shitty attitudes we have internalized.  The novels, then, hold up a mirror to our own, modern prejudices. Which is uncomfortable but pretty great.

So overall I'd say these books are pretty good, have considerable merit, and are not the schlocky Fantasy that I worried they might be.

That isn't to say they are without problems. I'd say the biggest issue with the Merchant Princes is bloat. There are a lot of separate storylines that get introduced, juggled, and at times neglected throughout the series. I mean, all of these story threads eventually come together and reach a reasonably satisfying conclusion (and the main storyline ends fabulously), but it is a lot to keep track of. And of course, these books are information dense which, while it makes the series interesting and is fundamental to my enjoyment of them, also taxes the readers ability to keep everything straight. (This is exacerbated a bit by the fact that some details clearly change, or alter over the course from the first to last novel.) I read all of these books sequentially over a month or so, so I was able to keep fairly abreast of all the goings on, but I could see someone who reads less in a week or doesn't read the series all at once getting hopelessly lost.

So at the end of the day I, somewhat surprisingly, really enjoyed The Merchant Princes. They are refreshing and clever, brutal and fun, and very, very smart. While I'm not sure I can recommend them to everyone, I feel like if you like Stross' Sci-Fi fiction you will enjoy these novels and if you like information dense stories with thrilling plots you ought to have fun with The Merchant Princes too. If you aren't sure about Stross or dense fiction, then I would give his classic novel Accelerando a try; it's great and best of all it can be downloaded legally for free in a variety of formats.