[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: The Traders' War by Charles Stross. The second omnibus in his Merchant Princes series, comprising The Clan Corporate and The Merchants' War. I really enjoyed the first omnibus, and I'm looking forward to this one.

And I'm enjoying it. But there is one thing that's irritating me, but although I don't think it's a spoiler at all, it is a bit long-winded now I've written it out, so I'll wrap it in tags

Spoiler:

We have two worlds. Our Earth and a parallel Earth where lots of history is different, and the level of the settlements in the US is up to around the 1200s or so.

Some people from the other Earth can travel to Earth and have been doing for the bast couple of hundred years. A character brought up on our Earth notes the many people in the other Earth who have smallpox scars. Clearly smallpox is still endemic on the other Earth.

But no-one is raising alarm bells about this. Their concerned about other trivial security concerns, but no-one seems to have considered the possibility of the reintroduction of smallpox to our Earth where almost no-one is vaccinated against it.

I can only think that he's going to raise this later, but I'm half a book in and it's still a non-issue.