Charles Stross' Merchant Princes multiverse: hints on his blog.

fraa Jad

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/07/advertising-interval.html#comment-2006684

Charles said: "it went the route of the post-1917 Russian Empire, only with shiny extras"

Allen Thomson replied: "Ok, so Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Beria, plus nukes, world walking and, one supposes, shoggoths. Yikes."

Charles: "Sovietism with Persian Characteristics. Also, a fanatical commitment to democracy.

(Because Miriam's masterstroke is to give the revolutionaries a playbook listing all the failed revolutions of her own time line, and what went wrong with them, along with advice: "try to find a new way to fail". And they listened.)"


So... Basically it's parallel worlds. If anyone who is familiar with the series can contribute what that would look like, that would be great! I'll give some background in the next few hours but this is really interesting.
 

fraa Jad

Miriam is from a timeline very similar to ours, they only diverge in the 20th century 90s or 80s, as far as I can deduce. She is currently exiled in a timeline in which there has been a cold war between the British monarchy in exile in the New World, and a French (Bourbon?) monarchy which is in charge of most of the rest of the world IIRC.
 

fraa Jad

I don't know how much more I can say without spoilering anything. But how do you think a timeline where a cold war starts during the industrial revolution between the British and French empires, and world walkers intervene with that knowledge plays out?
 

fraa Jad

Last comment: I surmise she is in charge of the secret service on the North American Commonwealth -- one assumes this is one of the successor states of the polity that encompassed the remnant of the British monarchy, which itself encompassed, at least theoretically, the whole of the Americas.
 

fraa Jad

So: what's Sovietism with Persian characteristics in that context -- I get the reference and it's fascinating.
 

Machiavelli Jr

fraa Jad said:
So: what's Sovietism with Persian characteristics in that context -- I get the reference and it's fascinating.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing that from the Big Book of Revolutions the two that Miriam and the NAC liked were a) Leninism (try to avoid the worse bits of Stalin) and b) the Islamic Republic of Iran. Which latter is a non-stupid decision; compared to most revolutionary regimes the Iranians have been remarkably functional for the last 37 years. Variant possibility; Charlie is messing with us with the "post-1917" and he means something more like the Provisional Government era with power balanced between workplace soviets and a more representative democracy. Which would have interesting parallels with the religious/military/civil divide in Iran...
 
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