This was an interesting book and it took me a while to get into - it probably didn't help that I hadn't read any of the other books.

But once I understood what was happening it was an interesting read and I am glad that I did it.

I was given an advance copy by netgalley and the publishers but the review is entirely my own.

From what I understand, this book had quite the long journey getting here and that does make it difficult if you read the series as it was released (as I did). There is so much going on, so many timelines, that jumping back in after a long absence felt slightly like hard work.

I struggled to pick up the threads again, and that's a shame because Stross has done some interesting storytelling here - exploring parallel worlds and (if you could jump between them), their affect on everything from politics to economics.

So if you're about to start reading book 1, or even if you've just finished reading book 2, I'd suggest binging them together rather than leaving big gaps in-between.

I won't go into the plot (as you may guess by now, it's complicated) but there are some fascinating ideas being explored through the multiple timelines on offer. The story hurtles from time to time as the plot progresses, only pausing to remind you how one person is related to another.

I sometimes wished it would slow down a bit, and ground me more in each moment, but I guess the story demanded forward motion!

3.5 for the book and 4 for the series

Invisible Sun sees Stross's multiple timeline story of politics, economics and development reach a potential conclusion, and also reach six books by the New Reckoning or nine Old Style (the first six, the Merchant Princes arc, were revised into three satisfyingly chunky volumes). In the course of its unfolding, the story has mutated from portal fantasy to SF, with a distinct technothrillery edge.

In Merchant Princes, Miriam Beckstein, who thought she was an ordinary young woman from Boston, struggled to come to terms with the reality that she was a world-walker able to cross between timelines, and a member of an other-Earthly aristocracy from a medieval kingdom. In the course of that narrative arc, Stross explored ideas about development, the functioning of states, the corruption of democracy and the interplay between family and the wider world - Miriam's cousins in the Clan, world-walking smugglers who put their abilities to good using trafficking special cargoes under the noses of officialdom, being great fans of Family.

Eventually Miriam took refuge in a nuclear-armed, revolutionary-democratic state, the New American Commonwealth, which occupies the American continent in another timeline. And so, in this last (at least for now) instalment, we see the Commonwealth squaring up to a paranoid security-state US. Paranoid, because it was attached with nukes by the Clan, who have now fled to the Commonwealth. It's a complex, game-theory driven situation, a para-time Cold War liable to go hot at any moment even before throwing in revolutionary ultras, a runaway Princess and independent-minded intelligence operatives who don't always think to clear their ploys though the chain of commend.

Elsewhere, though, a much worse threat to the future of the Earths (all of them) has awoken (giving Stross the opportunity to use 'Crisis on Infinite Earths' as a chapter title).

The title of the present book, Invisible Sun, picks up the "family" theme, viewing the effect on great events of family and personal connections as being like that of a great, gravitational mass moving through a solar system, warping space around it and producing unforeseen disturbances in the heavens at odds with the expected orderly progression. Notoriously, there's no exact mathematical solution to the dynamics of such a system (the famous many-body problem). So we see here the existence of not only the Clan, but another hidden family, one made rather than born, driving events in this book. (And in the author's Afterword we see the same theme occur again in real life as he explains why this book took longer to reach your hands than you might have expected).

I really, REALLY enjoyed seeing that second family, the Wolf Orchestra, in action. An old-style East German spy ring composed of sleeper agents in the US, they are now stranded with no home to return to, nobody to broker prisoner swaps with or offer diplomatic cover. But they are tuning up to play one last symphony, pitting their classical spycraft, their dead-letter drops and lamplighters, but more, their discipline and their loyalty to one another, against a modern panopticon state armed with endless cameras, massive compute resources and virtual hegemony in the West.

Virtual, not quite total. An entertaining subplot here features a Berlin police officer who insists on following the rules to the letter while his gang-ho DHS opposites stew in frustration. Also, those EU data protection rules which prevent the raw take from the exported to the US for processing.

I also enjoyed seeing the imaginative creation that Stross has made of the Commonwealth, not a perfect place by any means (indeed in some respects a rather deadly one) but an attempt, perhaps, at a sketch of a better nation. It's one that reminds the members of the Orchestra, in atmosphere if not in specifics, of their vanished home, but also allows them to see a perhaps more perfect version of that. Their status also leads to some moments of genuine, if grim, humour; 'It's not kidnapping: they asked us for political asylum... They're not doing so as American citizens but as citizens of the German Democratic Republic. If you don't like it, you can take it up with Erich Honecker's ghost.'

This book is, as I've come to expect from Stross, slick, thought-provoking but above all, fun with rapid-fire deployment concepts from science, engineering, espionage, defence, politics (of all sorts: within families, within organisations, between arms of a State, between nations, between timelines, you name it) and much, much more. (I loved JUGGERNAUT). Want to see how a princess from an ancien regime, Diving Right of Kings monarchy might behave when she escapes into 21st century Berlin? Look no further. How about a perspective on the accelerating defence technology of a rapidly industrialising revolutionary polity with paratime espionage capability? Here it is. Would you like to to know how that paratime capability might have come into being, and what it means? It's here.

Yes, in this book, we finally see the veil lifted on the origin of the Clan's ability, and how it fits with that other threat, the one that the US and the Commonwealth have been ignoring as they manoeuvre and jostle for advantage. It could be that is a BIG mistake as the book pivots fully into apocalyptic SF...

I would STRONGLY recommend Invisible Sun. It brings epic closure to the Empire Games arc, revisiting many much-loved characters as well as exalting in the doings of new ones such as Rita Douglas and Liz Hanover who are both EXCELLENT and should get more coverage SOON.

I could also swear I saw hooks for followups, despite Stross's protestations about this in the Afterword. Maybe once he's got over writing something longer than War and Peace, he might change his mind?

I have to confess, I pretty much just strapped myself in for the ride on this one. There really was enough material for two books, so it felt a tiny bit squashed in. The four worlds made things rather complicated, and even though Stross tries to keep the reader up to date, by re-capping on past events and character relationships, this is self-defeating, as it becomes rather repetitious. That said, it is Stross, and he is a great writer, well able to crank up the tension and build suspense. So Invisible Sun is one where you can just sit back and enjoy the ride, confident that you are in capable hands.

I’ve read and loved previous books by Charles Stross, in particular the Laundry series, and I read the opening books in the “Empire Games” trilogy what now feels like years ago. Following a protracted gestation, the third volume, “Invisible Sun”, is here.
There is a short recap of the events so far at the start and a list of the main characters, which is usually a sure sign that there are too many of them and consequently the story will be hard to follow. I would recommend that anyone wanting to get the most out of this book should read the previous two parts first as this space opera about alternative warring timelines can be confusing at times.
Stross started the “Empire Games” series four years ago, but the concluding volume has been delayed by family tragedies, the loss of his editor and the pandemic. Unfortunately, although I sympathise with the problems which beset this book, I can’t honestly say it was worth the wait.
“Invisible Sun” isn’t terrible but its main objective is to resolve the multiple plot threads from the previous two books. New and interesting elements are peppered throughout the text but they disappear as quickly as they arrived. It is very long and feels padded in places. Also the main characters’ relationship is mentioned multiple times even though it’s in the opening recap and longtime readers will already know about it. Also a character has blue hair one minute, then green, then back to blue. It feels like the book was written at different times and Stross forgot what he’d previously written, which is understandable given the circumstances of its creation, but the proofreader should have picked up on these things.
The antagonists are slightly cliched but it’s not the first or last sci-fi novel to be guilty of that. It also feels rather “old-fashioned”, being very much a pseudo-Cold War novel with many allusions to the Eastern Bloc and nuclear proliferation. Keeping the multiple timelines in mind and making sense of them can also be a bit of a headache but I am used to this from reading the previous books.
So not the classic conclusion we wanted, but there are enough galactic cataclysms and space battles to keep the reader satisfied.

I can’t blame Charles Stross for thinking Invisible Sun must be cursed. The capper to a series originating almost twenty years ago, it’s been serially delayed by family tragedies, the loss of a longtime editor, bouts of burnout, and COVID. It would have been understandable if it’d never been finished.

Unfortunately, the experience of finally reading Invisible Sun is a bit like opening the FedEx™ Tom Hanks delivers at the end of Cast Away; I’m grateful it’s arrived, and honoured by the herculean effort embodied in this small parcel. But the contents are past their best-by, banged up by the journey, and a bit small next to the saga of their arrival.

To be clear, Invisible Sun isn’t a _bad_ novel: it understands its genre, stays reasonably true to its characters, and delivers at least two spectacular para-time set pieces on the way to wrapping up a sprawling series plot. But much is sacrificed to resolve plot threads. Baroque-but-interesting frills like Mormon-Adventist rivalry in US intel services or the view from Imperial France are sidelined ruthlessly, and a War-of-the-Worlds-esque omniscient narrator has to intrude regularly with info-dumps. Prominent issues from past books — Rita’s ultimate loyalties, Elizabeth’s willingness to actually defect, the Americans’ choice between paranoid fanaticism and realpolitik pragmatism — are mentioned briefly and collapsed quickly.

This’d be fine if the novel was as propulsive as its lovingly-described bombers and subs and spacecraft, but it’s a bumpy, occasionally baggy ride. The book starts with inevitable reminders about the characters, their relationship to each other, last book’s plot, etc. etc., but Stross feels the need to jog our memory almost Every. Single. Time. we shift perspective right to the bitter end. So yes, by page 400 I’m definitely solid on the fact Miriam is Rita’s birth mother and Juggernaut is a copy of Project ORION, I’ve got it, no need to awkwardly wedge that info into expository dialogue once more, but it’ll happen at least twice again before the book is over. Which is, uh, some time yet.

The foreshadowing can be as frustrating as the recaps. A few times we’re given a triumphant swell of plot music as the Wolf Orchestra decisively swings into action and fine details of Elizabeth’s phone determine her future destiny, except they…don’t? The book feels littered with these little leftovers from earlier drafts, emotional dead links that don’t click through. And yet our omniscient narrator also lays out how the baddies can be beaten in such a way any experienced reader can immediately and comprehensively guess the end. Yes, Chehov’s nukes over the fireplace are totally going off in the third act, we might guess how, but I’d rather not be _told_ in advance.

There are plenty of other gripes to be had, from a frankly clichéd choice of baddies (whose motivations to Kill All Humans is at odds with a civilizational MO that seemingly doesn’t care about terrestrial planets? At all? Shouldn’t they be digesting Jupiter instead? Asking for a friend?), to timeline numbering glitches to a character whose hair changes from blue to green to blue over three scenes without comment.

All these nitpicks sap momentum, but Invisible Sun is hampered even more by its curious untimeliness. Some of this is plain bad luck; in 2017 you could still get mileage out of fears of a hyper-competent paranoid infosec state, but Trump and Brexit happened and those nightmares just don’t land the way they used to. Yet at its heart this is really a novel about the Cold War, with evocations of grand para-time strategy, nuclear everything, and (many, many) comparisons to the Eastern Bloc. Which is fine, you can write about the Cold War and the Bush years, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t always feel relevant. While our parcel was struggling to be delivered, the world moved on.