Empire Games
- 336
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
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Our view
Charles Stross’s “Empire Games” is a tense, wide-ranging spy thriller across parallel timelines that continues the Merchant Princes saga. Some readers praise its scope and Rita Douglas’s growth from drifting outsider to capable agent; others cannot warm to her and find the going slow. Some readers also note that the story stops mid-stride, leaving much unresolved. It can be followed alone, but readers of the earlier books get more out of it.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
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 North America. 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? Empire Games is the first book in the exciting series set in the same world as Charles Stross' The Merchant Princes series. 'Mind-boggling, complex and truly brilliant' Daily Mail
Reading order · The Merchant Princes
Full order & progress →- The Family TradeStart here
7.67.6 / 10 - The Hidden Family
7.87.8 / 10 - The Clan Corporate
7.67.6 / 10 - The Merchants' War
–Not ranked yet - The Revolution Business
–Not ranked yet - The Trade of Queens
–Not ranked yet - Empire GamesThis book
8.08.0 / 10 - Dark State
–Not ranked yet - Invisible Sun
–Not ranked yet
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.2 across 70 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 32% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Fantasy average of 8.0. That is how 8.0 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.6 | 5 | 7% |
| Hardcover | 8.3 | 65 | 93% |
Frequently asked
How long is Empire Games?
It has 336 pages — shorter than 90% of the ranked books in Fantasy.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Fantasy — and a score of 8.0, the closest to this book.
