Neptune's Brood

With Charlie Stross space opera Neptune's Brood both up for the best novel Hugo and on special offer, now seemed like a good time to read it.

What really differentiates the book from most space opera is the detailed interstellar banking system that Stross uses to underpin everything that happens. This involves splitting money into three types: fast local money, medium investment instruments, and complex slow money that involves a triangular agreement between two entities separated by astronomical distances and overseen by a neutral third party bank that can be used to fund new colonisation projects. By it's nature slow money, which effectively travels at a third of the speed of light, is vastly valuable, effectively uncounterfeitable, but susceptible to specific types of fraud.

The protagonist, Krina Alizond-114, is an academic historian specialising in the history of various types of slow money fraud on a slow tour of various star systems. Transmitted to the Dojima system beacon, where she intends to study with her near-sibling Ana Graulle-90, she learns that her relative relocated in-system to the water-world of Shin-Tethys before abruptly vanishing. Booking transport on the next ship to leave, Krina finds herself on board a particularly chaotic space church complete with walking skeletons and a homicidal maniac. So it is almost with relief that Krina finds herself falling in with a group of pirates who agree to take her down to the planet, from where she can start looking into the mystery of Ana's disappearance.

The book starts very slowly with Stross setting up his universe by having Krina give detailed info-dumps on how the baroque financial system works. These are leavened slightly by the grotesque interludes aboard the church — all of whose inhabitants seem to be completely disfunction — but even so the first half feels like a bit of a slog if you're not an economics nerd. But when the scene shifts to the planet, the pace accelerates rapidly and the murky plot begins to clear, throwing all the complicated and extremely clever world-building into abrupt focus. The denouement, when it comes, is almost an aside: as an historian and accountant, Krina is almost completely indifferent to the mechanics of combat and consequently fails to attach much in the way of importance to it.

Thus the whole book, from the very detailed descriptions, the amusingly over-precise descriptions — as a post-human, Krina routinely favours the hieratic, talking about gas exchangers rather than lungs and lacrimal fluid rather that tears — and the abrupt ending seem to me to owe an awful lot to the Stephensonian school of writing. That said, there are some amusingly snarky moments, and the ideas the book puts forward are intriguing, as is their eventual resolution. So while this may not be my favourite Stross — partly thanks to the my dislike of novels that are economics heavy — it's still a decent read and vastly more intelligent than most of the stuff out there...