Empire Games

3 primary works

Empire Games

by Charles Stross

Published 17 January 2017

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

Dark State

by Charles Stross

Published 9 January 2018

Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross dives deep into the underbelly of paratime espionage, nuclear warfare, and state surveillance in this provocative techno-thriller set in The Merchant Princes multi-verse Dark State ups the ante on the already volatile situations laid out in the sleek techno-thriller Empire Games, the start to Stross' new story-line, and perfect entry point for new readers, in The Merchant Princes series . In the near-future, the collision of two nuclear superpowers across timelines, one in the midst of a technological revolution and the other a hyper-police state, is imminent. In Commissioner Miriam Burgeson's timeline, her top level agents run a high risk extraction of a major political player. Meanwhile, a sleeper cell activated in Rita's, the Commissioner's adopted daughter and newly-minted spy, timeline threatens to unravel everything. With a penchant for intricate world-building and an uncanny ability to realize alternate history and technological speculation, Stross' writing will captivate any reader who's a fan hi-tech thrillers, inter-dimensional political intrigue, and espionage.

Invisible Sun

by Charles Stross

Published 19 January 2021

In this chillingly resonant dystopian adventure, two versions of America are locked in conflict. Invisible Sun concludes Charles Stross’s Empire Games trilogy.

Two twinned worlds are facing attack

The New American Commonwealth is caught in a deadly arms race with the USA, its parallel-world rival. And the USA’s technology is decades ahead. Yet the Commonweath might self-combust first – for its leader has just died, leaving a crippling power vacuum. Minister Miriam Burgeson must face allegations of treason without his support, in a power grab by her oldest adversary.

However, all factions soon confront a far greater danger . . . In their drive to explore other timelines, high-tech USA awakened an alien threat. This force destroyed humanity on one version of Earth. And if the two superpowers don’t take action, it will do the same to them.

Invisible Sun follows Empire Games and Dark State. This trilogy is set in the same dangerous parallel world as Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes sequence.