Neptune's Brood

By: Charles Stross

Narrated by: Emily Gray

The year is AD 7000. The human species is extinct - for the fourth time - due to its fragile nature. Krina Alizond-114 is metahuman, descended from the robots that once served humanity. She’s on a journey to the water-world of Shin-Tethys to find her sister Ana. But her trip is interrupted when pirates capture her ship. Their leader, the enigmatic Count Rudi, suspects that there’s more to Krina’s search than meets the eye.

He’s correct: Krina and Ana each possess half of the fabled Atlantis Carnet, a lost financial instrument of unbelievable value - capable of bringing down entire civilizations. Krina doesn’t know that Count Rudi suspects her motives, so she accepts his offer to get her to Shin-Tethys in exchange for an introduction to Ana. And what neither of them suspects is that a ruthless body-double assassin has stalked Krina across the galaxy, ready to take the Carnet once it is whole - and leave no witnesses alive to tell the tale…

©2012 Charles Stross (P)2013 Recorded Books

Creative Sci-fi

This is my second Strong book. The ideas are not quite as radical as Accelerando but the story was far better. Overall enjoyable read.

Space Finances

Not a continuation of Saturn's Children, I have to say I liked this one better since I find the world created very interesting. And financial crime in space is, well, very different! That being said, beyond the finances and the space setting, the rest of the book didn't catch me. Maybe that is because of the large explanatory pieces, or something else. I'm not sure, just left feeling only partially satisfied.

Commerce amongst the stars

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.”

This line, which comes early in “Neptune’s Brood,” pretty much sums up how I reacted to this surprisingly engaging sci-fi look at commerce amongst the stars. You do not need to be a Jane Austen fan to enjoy this book, but you’d better be ready to hear about interstellar economics leavened with a serving of very dry humor. This novel is for you if you enjoy lines like that one, or this:

“Nothing concentrates the mind like starting a new management job In the middle of a space battle.”

[I listened to this as an audio book read by Emily Gray, who did a fantastic job, giving the different post-humans varied voices and personalities that made them really come alive.]

Capitalism conquers the stars

This fast-paced story combines the fascinating post-human robo-society of Stross’s earlier “Saturn’s Children” with an intriguing thesis that even over interstellar distances, the Almighty Dollar is the greatest force in nature. I found it hard to decide if this later was a satiric extreme or a natural progression of macroeconomics. Stross argues that human curiosity, cooperative aspirations, and other trite SF notions for the expansion of civilization into the stars are all naively ignoring the truth of how things ultimately get done: by the patient application of market forces to a situation. Here, physical colonization missions are prohibitively expensive, and can only be undertaken with the understanding that the newly established colonies pay off their “foundational debt” with the only currency that can realistically flow between the stars: information. Hilariously, but quite believably, everything in this civilization bends to this notion: space pirates are instead ‘insurance adjusters’, planetary monarchs are ‘bank presidents’, and citizens are born chattel until the day they earn off their own ‘instantiation debt’. Superimposed onto this narrative worldview is the equally exotic outlook of mechanical life. Designed to be more resilient to the hostile environments of the universe beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and with many adopting non-anthropomorphic body plans, they nonetheless inherit quite a bit of human psychology and skeuomorphic behaviors. This keeps the characters relatable while still allowing the narrative enough flexibility to beam their consciousnesses between stars at lightspeed (something prohibited for material objects for most of the story). The plot alternates between between moments of furious action and stretches of historical exposition chronicled by the narrator in a ongoing diary, intended for an audience as unfamiliar to the setting as we. One humorous running gag throughout is the exception-less failure of unmodified humanity (referred to as ‘The Fragile’) to quickly run extinct despite post-human societies’ every attempt to help. The novel’s strongest moments, I think, are when financial concepts are explained to the reader, with a sugar-coating of SF to help it go down agreeably.

Even without humans, finance rules

Stross' Neptune's Brood is set in the same universe, but further into the future as Saturn's Children. Humans have come and gone multiple times. but their robot creations have carried on, recapitulating human ambitions and drive with regard to exploration, settlement, and establishment of organizational structure throughout the galaxy. Stross explores the financial requirements necessary to support interstellar colonization and development as well as the resulting potential for fraud, corruption, and get-rich-quick schemes, including a variant of the classical Ponzi scheme. The story concerns a lowly bank examiner for a large money center bank who also happens to have a hobby focusing on archaeological accountancy (basically digging up long forgotten financial transaction to collect any leftover booty). Her travels take her on an adventure that is engaging and entertaining as well as thought provoking.

The sci-fi elements are mostly android abstractions with multiple unique and clever implementations that allow robots to survive in strange environments. Stross also explores the impact of longer (centuries) survival times. The various plot twists and turns are largely unexpected with a varied cast of anthropomorphic robots that make up a wonderful cast of characters ensemble.

The narration is very well done with a solid range of characters that correctly captures nuance and subtlety.