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Neptune's Brood (2013)

by Charles Stross(Favorite Author)

3.77 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0425256774 (ISBN13: 9780425256770)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Ace Hardcover

series

Freyaverse

review 1: 3 and a half stars. space opera set in a far future dominated by posthuman populations, in which all societal transactions have been monetized. the hero is a forensic accountant who investigates a major scam perpetrated two thousand years back in a very long con. the lost financial instrument she's chasing, then, spreadsheets that prove what happened, have broad financial consequences well beyond revealing a conspiracy/massacre that would be a war crime if war still made any economic sense. various parties declare mutually incompatible financial interests along the way, including an itinerant insurance company operating in space as privateers, a mendicant Church of the Fragile seeking to repopulate the stars with humans, and some very focussed merchant bankers looking for ... morea long-awaited score. meanwhile the whole currency system may collapse if a FTL drive, a holy grail that would destroy the whole principle behind slow money, proves to be possible. all debts eventually come due and must be tallied and collected, and some of them, against all odds, turn out to have ethical as well as monetary implications. in short, a typical romp with the wild imagination of Charlie Stross, extrapolating from the present day.
review 2: I think this is the first space opera I've read where there is no such thing as faster than light travel. In fact, it takes that as a premise, and then imagines all the other crazy things that would need to be necessary to have a functional intergalactic society nonetheless. This includes brains encoded in chips, but also, more importantly, how their economy would function. Stross does a good job of providing a complex explanation of their financial system (particularly "slow money"), but then writing the story so that even if you didn't totally understand all the details, everything still makes sense. less

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