Armin Shimerman's The Merchant Prince

As with most SciFi books I read, the initial reason I picked it up was because of the cover art. The artwork by Jerry Vanderstelt features a confident man in Renaissance period clothing standing in front of a modern and slightly futuristic city. The expression and eyes of the character (purported to be a portrait of the main character, Dr. John Dee) are extremely interesting and I've found myself looking into the face on the cover more than a few times.

Anyway, the book itself is about a man of Elizabethan England named Dr. John Dee. The main character is based upon a real historical person who while trapped in the keeping of the infamous Medici clan is rescued by an alien who had been posing as a sort of familiar spirit to Dr. Dee for some time.

This alien, Dyckon, saves his life and returns Dr. Dee to earth some 500+ years later. As it turns out the worlds most powerful man, Royal Newton, is about to develop a doomsday device to destroy the earth. Dee takes it on himself to stop Newton from destroying the earth.

There is something intriguing about dropping a man (or woman, I suppose) from the future into the past or from the past into the future. I think this is partly because everyone has at some point romanticized about the possibility of being transported into another part of history where their particular attributes would propel them to quick success.

In this case, Shimerman has created a world in 2099 that is very similar to Dee's own 1500's. The earth has, through a number of wars and natural calamities, lost some of it's modern civility. The world is a highly dangerous place where corporate leaders form the worlds major players, their kings so to speak. These corporate giants then trade for greater wealth and power and are ruthless in their dealings.

The worlds largest corporate player is Royal Newton. This man is invincible and has more wealth than he could ever possibly use. He uses this power to develop the promise of unlimited power in the form of antimatter that would be able to lift the earth out of the resource starvation imposed by the population explosion and calamaties of the 21st century. Unfortunately, this technology is really beyond earth's technology to control and when activated will incinerate the whole planet (somewhat similar to the fears that the Hydrogen bomb, when detonated, would cause atomic fusion of the Oxygen in the atmosphere).

We know that this atrocity will happen because the enlightened races of the universe, the Collegium of Worlds, is watching and has seen it happen before. The Collegium is waiting for the moment the technology is active and are ready to swoop in to stop the humans from utterly destroying themselves. Instead, they will enslave humanity and strip the planet bare of the resources to develop metal technology in the future. One of the races of the Collegium is pushing earth towards this calamity because they are the ones charged with the execution of this law (and also the benefactors of it, gaining all the resources of the planet in less than a millenia).

The book itself teeters on the edge of believability, in my opinion. Dee himself is easily acclimated to a world where money and power manipulate men. He handles the technological culture shock as being attributed captured elementals and demons. Yet, he is able to understand the nature and use of the "Omni-Web" with very little explanation because the virtual reality realm is very similar to the altered states he entered to cast spells in his own time.

I think the author delves a little too deeply into the details a few times. In a couple spots he tries to enumerate computer hacking in the future, but as a computer hacker of sorts myself, his explanations are deeply unsatisfying. The solutions to problems in firewalls and the sort are either too simple or too unlikely. I'm reminded of the Star Trek episode where Data causes the Borg ship to self-destruct by hacking the system and forcing it into "Sleep Mode." Of course, being a fan of SciFi, I am used to suspending some amount of my reality sense to read the book, but this just stretched a little too thin for me.

All in all, the book was interesting and held my attention, but I think Shimerman needs a little more practice at writing. It just feels a bit amateurish. On the other hand, I understand that this is the first in a series. I would read the next one to see what he comes up with. I don't think I would want to as my next book, but it was entertaining enough to follow through with to see if Shimerman can create a new plot in the same universe. It seems that some authors can create unique stories within one universe (Card) and others can create really compelling universes (Weber). This book is promising enough, but just doesn't quite get there. Anyway, I'm rambling...