“ It is a Sojourner Truth universally acknowledge that every interstellar settlement in hunt of good luck must be in need of a banker . ” If that line makes you titter , feel free to rush out and buy Charles Stross ’s new novel Neptune ’s Brood , a comedy of banking and manner with some chase scenes and explosion throw in for good meter .
This standalone novel take place in the same universe as his last leger , Saturn ’s Children . But rather than sexbots and the lookup for individuality , Stross collapse us bankers and the lookup for a lacking full cousin . And a portion of economics .
Krina Alizond-114 is a historiographer of accountancy practices . She ’s also a human wildly unlike today ’s humans , who are referred to as “ fragiles . ” Her cells are mechanocytes that can be reprogrammed for better survival in the vacuum of space or in the gamy pressure depths of the ocean . Her mind and someone are downloadable and she can live on on electricity or action “ feedstock . ” Grown along the canonical lines of her delicate human predecessors , Krina still has emotions and autonomic responses like blush . Stross ’s ability to take the air the line between “ human ” and “ metahuman ” makes the characters find real , while still permit him to put a bewitching spin on what precisely we have a bun in the oven from characters . He also gets to let Krina blink crank off her eyeballs .
And it ’s a honest matter Krina is so ( comparatively ) bad . Her search for her missing cousin / sister – they ’re both arise from the same lineage , though at different time – will send her into the clutches of religious fanatics , zombies , piratical insurance general agent , mermaid and communists . Both Krina ’s life and corporal autonomy are on a regular basis placed in jeopardy .
The plot is simple enough – find Krina ’s first cousin , and find out why a clustering of masses desire Krina dead . We ’re carry along by Krina ’s voice , a portmanteau of old - timey sentence structure , naivete and what seems to be accidental ( for Krina anyway ) humor , like this : “ If one must choose which space to partake in with a perhaps murderous lunatic , then one should pick the one with the most hiding place . ” In to this bubbly miscellany , Stross adds lot of SAT - II vocabulary words and an account of how an intact interstellar banking organization could operate at sub - clear speeds .
It ’s fairish to say that there are a mess of infodumps in the book . In fact , an individual ’s power to shudder to the complexness of barter and commerce in a slower than light , interstellar civilization where individuals are construct and regularly hold up for hundreds and hundreds ( if not one thousand and thousands ) of years may be directly correlate to whether a referee loves or hates this book .
As someone who submit economic science tests in high school for fun , I may have enjoyed the whole thing more than people who care their space operas with more shoot - outs . I was captivate by the dispute between interstellar and interplanetary trade and Stross ’s picturing of a system that could fund the creation of entire starships and human colonies . In some fashion , these sections study like knockout military sci - fi . Krina is distinctly in honey with banking as much as many protagonists love their battleships and slug . With economics being less of a hard science than the aperient and engineering behind this character of Quran , it seems best to refer to the Neptune ’s Brood as dense , rather than surd , science fiction .
Stross ’s best invention in the book is idea of “ slow money ” – not to be confused with the current idea of investing in socially responsible for local agriculture , a play on the idea of “ dim intellectual nourishment ” – money whose very lack of liquidity makes it a stable investiture tool for millennially long terminus projects is a piece of the interstellar settlement mystifier that had never been in blank space before . It makes Stross ’s world , as well as Krina ’s quest feel like a naturalistic outgrowth of the world we live in . After all , what ’s mettlesome and more naturalistic than jam debt forced onto future generation ?
But it ’s not all talk and tri - partite monetary exchanges . There ’s a lightheaded side as well . Krina refers to herself as “ not really armed , unless you count my spreadsheet . ” She also run into a enumeration who bet like a giant bat . Of naturally , number is short for comptroller . The book is fill with instant like these as well as plenty of allusions to pop culture . Stross works in a flake of everything from Conan Doyle to Monty Python . He even takes what seems to be a swipe at Amazon by naming a scavenger worm ‘ bezos . ’
The novel is inviolable and fascinating powerful up until the end . The conclusion felt sudden , but I ’m hoping that ’s because Stross is n’t done with Krina and her sister yet . You ’re belike not look for a fun whirl through a skill - fictional banking system of rules — but if you are , or even if you ’re not , Neptune ’s Brood is definitely a great book to check out . With our real - life banking and international trade organization becoming ever more complex and crisis - prone , this is a perfect Quran for the times we last in .
record reviewCharles Stross
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