Review: The Trade of Queens

The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So finally done - it was a pretty decent series. Got a bit depressing and hard to get through / follow towards the end, and I missed the simplicity of the earlier ones - as you add more people, more characters, more worlds, and more problems, it just gets harder and harder, more and more sluggish - but ACRONYMS aside, it still stayed pretty good all the way till the end.
It was a tragic ending - one group instigates a war, the other group responds with madness, and the simple general population of the world - who never asked for the war, the world-walkers, the games they played - pays the price in a nuclear winter while the guilty parties escape scot-free.

It's left the door open for sequels, but I'm not sure where it can go from here without a whole new series. The best part of the whole concept - applying economics, engineering and political science to magic - was the single most unique, impressive, and stand-out part of this series.

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