The best science fiction adventure novels about traders

This omnibus collects eleven short stories about space merchant Nicholas Van Rijn. Van Rijn (no coincidence that he’s Dutch) is literate, clever, eccentric in speech, archaic in dress, and occasionally valiant in battle – but he’d much rather trade than fight, and although he describes trade as “swindling each other,” he characteristically strikes deals that benefit all parties.

Van Rijn’s trade-in spices (he is CEO of the Solar Spice and Liquors Company) is a callout to the history of the Dutch East India Company. The great early modern companies (and specifically, the British East India Company) are one of the inspirations in my book: they founded some fortunes and give to startling adventure stories, but the contradictions inherent in their nature also led to corruption and oppression.

Depending on whether you read the series in omnibus form or not, Quicksilver is the first either of three or the first of ten books by Neal Stephenson, comprising the Baroque Cycle. This is a rip-roarin’, swashbuckling adventure that also manages to be cerebral and hilarious. In the biggest picture, the cycle is the story of the transition of Europe into modernity. In its specific plot threads, the narrative embraces the dispute between Newton and Leibniz over the invention of calculus, alchemy, King Solomon’s gold, the career of John Churchill, the Royal Society, and its advances in natural philosophy, and the invention of modern finance. Though it’s set in the seventeenth century, the series is attitudinally science fiction, examining big societal questions through scientific and technical lenses. Above all, it’s fun.

If you only know Foundation from its recent television incarnation, you might think it’s principally about cloned emperors and a young woman with psychic powers. But Asimov’s actual book, consisting of stories written when he was quite young, is about the attempt to found a kind of ark where a remnant of galactic civilization can outlast an imminent dark age. His heroes aren’t warriors, but include academics, politicians, and, in two of the five stories (“The Traders” and “The Merchant Princes”), merchants. These are buccaneering traders on the edge of civilization, who sometimes resort to blackmail, but they mostly use their wits, their keen powers of observation, and their ability to negotiate to outmaneuver their enemies and advance Hari Seldon’s plan to save civilization.

Dune is Frank Herbert’s deconstruction of the idea of the heroic leader. It’s not principally a story about merchants or trade. On the other hand, the action of the book is all driven by the fact that all parties in the book want control of the spice melange, because it allows space travel, because it develops psychic powers, or because it gives wealth. The war of which Dune tells the beginning, and in which Paul Atreides will become a terrible, bloody messiah, is the result of the failure to trade, so by means of a sort of photographic-negative narrative, it tells us why trade matters so much. The sweep of the story is grand, the scope ambitious, and the ideas are perennially important. 

In The Pride of Chanur, a human prisoner escapes from the alien kif, who are interrogating him and who have killed his shipmates. The human stows away aboard a hani merchant vessel (the hani are non-human sentients; think large humanoid cats); when discovered, he talked the ship’s captain into making him part of the (otherwise female and hani) crew. The kif attempt to bully the hani into giving up their human crewmate, but they refuse and retreat, until the kif are overextended and have to return home. This is a psychologically rich and entertaining novel that is about spaceships, but whose action is all subterfuge, negotiation, and diplomacy, rather than shooting.