The family trade
A bold fantasy in the tradition of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, The Merchant Princes is a sweeping new series from the hottest new writer in science fiction! Miriam Beckstein is happy in her life. She's a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine in Boston, making good money doing what she loves. When her researcher brings her iron-clad evidence of a money-laundering scheme, Miriam thinks she's found the story of the year. But when she takes it to her editor, she's fired on the spot and gets a death threat from the criminals she has uncovered. Before the day is over, she's received a locket left by the mother she never knew-the mother who was murdered when she was an infant. Within is a knotwork pattern, which has a hypnotic effect on her. Before she knows it, she's transported herself to a parallel Earth, a world where knights on horseback chase their prey with automatic weapons, and where world-skipping assassins lurk just on the other side of reality - a world where her true family runs things. The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes, a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between the worlds makes them rich in both. Braids of family loyalty and intermarriage provide a fragile guarantee of peace, but a recently-ended civil war has left the families shaken and suspicious. Taken in by her mother's people, she becomes the star of the story of the century-as Cinderella without a fairy godmother.
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What Hacker News says
- > antipode
Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer.
But saying that, I disagree: space opera isn't the opposite of hard SF. Science fantasy is. Space opera is a different sort of extreme, which makes the point that this is not an X-Y scale we're talking about here. There's no Mohs scale of hardness of SF.
It's at least a 2D area:
hard <-> soft
is at 90º to
rigorous <-> totally without rigour
Does it have a set of rules or axioms you can work out? If it has, does it apply them strictly? Does it play by its own rules, or does the author does improvise as they go along, changing the rules?
Where "the rules" are real life science, physics etc., for hard SF, modulo some additional plot device, whereas for sci-fantasy it has its own rules but they're not our rules. Say, an innate ability to step into other universes (say, Amber by Roger Zelazny, or the Family Trade by Charles Stross), or using a machine (the Long Earth books by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett).
I take this line-vs-area argument from /Red/, /Green/ and /Blue Mars/ by Kim Stanley Robinson. Those are pretty hard SF -- no FTL, no AI –- but Mars has a lot more nitrogen than it seems to and they invent life extension.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813407
And not to forget:
"The sky was the color of a dead laptop display, silver-gray and full of rain."
- Charles Stross, The Family Trade. 2004
"The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright cheery blue.!"
- Robert J. Sawyer, Wake. 2009
There are probably more.
- If it's anything like the Family Trade series of books then the economic or financial subject may only be used to colour the main plot and give a mood. I don't expect the author to actually be a "hard-economic" author like Stefan Baxter is a hard-science author.
