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Neptune's Brood

(Freyaverse #2)

Charles Stross (Goodreads Author)

3.84 · Rating details · 4,895 Ratings · 483 Reviews

Krina Alizond is a metahuman in a universe where the last natural humans became extinct five thousand years ago. When her sister goes missing she embarks on a daring voyage across the star systems to find her, travelling to her last known location - the mysterious water-world of Shin-Tethys.

In a universe with no faster-than-light travel that's a dangerous journey, made all ...more

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Hardcover, 336 pages

Published July 2nd 2013 by Ace (first published January 1st 2013)

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Lists with This Book

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

2014 Sci-Fi Award Nominees

44 books — 38 voters

Science Fiction - 2010-2019

409 books — 590 voters

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Jul 03, 2013 Bradley rated it really liked it

Shelves: economics, sci-fi, worldbuilding-sf

It's not for everyone, but I personally love financial sci-fi stories. Mr. Stross blew my mind with Accelerando, but the merchant novels were quite good as well, and one should never forget Rule 34. In fact, I've been enjoying a lot of financial chicanery novels over the last decade and a half. Like I said, it's not for everyone, but it is for the type of person who loves a good heist novel with huge-scale grifters and con-men.

Make no mistake, it's a heist novel, but it happens to be populated ...more

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Dec 27, 2013 Tom Lee rated it it was ok

Charles Stross is brilliant and prolific and maybe a bit lazy. That's the best explanation I have for books like Neptune's Brood. It seems clear from his prose and his blog that he gets seized by an idea (this novel starts with a quote from David Graeber's book about debt) and then rapidly cranks out a story on top of whatever intellectual scaffolding emerges from his brilliant noodling. The approach prioritizes creativity over craft, and I find it kind of irksome.

This is a shitty novel. The pro Charles Stross is brilliant and prolific and maybe a bit lazy. That's the best explanation I have for books like Neptune's Brood. It seems clear from his prose and his blog that he gets seized by an idea (this novel starts with a quote from David Graeber's book about debt) and then rapidly cranks out a story on top of whatever intellectual scaffolding emerges from his brilliant noodling. The approach prioritizes creativity over craft, and I find it kind of irksome.

This is a shitty novel. The protagonist's narration is irritating (she says things like "quoth I") and the book's full of cliches and off-putting pop culture references ("the game is afoot"; "a hive of scum and villainy"; "strap yourself in, it's going to be a bumpy ride"; "oh snap" -- the last of these is particularly galling, since there's no other contemporary vernacular in the book). Stross repeatedly reuses archaic words in a word-of-the-day-calendar sort of mode ("barratry", "demesne"). The plot's boring and the ending is abrupt. There is, admittedly, a clever twist near the end (actually, the writing gets a little better, too). But the whole thing seems rushed.

The book is about interstellar finance, and for what it's worth, Paul Krugman thinks it's a good treatment of the topic. I'm a little less sanguine about it.

Stross constructs a universe where physics works pretty much the way we understand it to. Travel between stars is very difficult. Humanity can only move mass around at about 1% of the speed of light, but lasers can be used to transmit information between distant worlds in just a few years. Colonized star systems can therefore trade information but not goods. Fortunately, some singularity-ish inventions about copying minds mean that people can travel as information, having new bodies grown for them at their destinations.

Stross posits local currencies within each star system, which makes sense. But the systems trade between themselves in "slow dollars," which are an extremely stable medium of exchange. Stross refers to them explicitly using the word "bitcoin" but he makes it clear that transactions are signed by a certificate authority (a star system bank, its identity axiomatically verified by the origin of its laser), which makes me think he missed the point of bitcoin. He makes some weird assertions about signals being hijackable, too, which make no sense given all the cryptographic signing that's going on.

I'm a little fuzzier on the trade stuff. The idea is basically this: sending a colonization effort to a distant star is really expensive for its backers. Once the colonists arrive and set up their laser, they incur debt in slow dollars to pay for needed specialists who immigrate their minds to the system. Eventually the founders of the new colony get out from under this debt by sending off their own colony ships, which incur their own debts from their parent system, which are used to repay the original lenders.

This is described as a Ponzi scheme, and you can sort of see why -- though it seems absurd on its face that the colonization and development of entire solar systems isn't considered to be wealth-generating.

But I don't understand how minds could be a scarce resource when they can be copied. Individuals could withold the rights to do so, but one can easily imagine the rise of open source colonists, or the existence of a small number of people willing to sell infinite copying rights, making the market collapse. Because astronomical distances make enforcement impractical, there's no interstellar (non-financial) legal framework. And of course new polities historically don't have much respect for (ahem) intellectual property.

Minds are the only resource that Stross offers as a justification for interstellar trade and the elaborate financial mechanisms that are supposed to surround it (scientific development has been stagnant for centuries, and there doesn't seem to be much meaningful cultural exchange). But I don't see how an economy based on selling minds could possibly work. Not only would the new systems not need to incur much debt to get the settlers they require, but it's unclear why the debt-holding systems would care about repayment in a currency that's mostly good for a resource they no longer need. Admittedly, this is less of a problem: I don't have much of a need for gold, but would be happy to be paid in it, because other people do need it. But it still seems a little odd.

These objections don't unravel the novel entirely -- certainly other, better sci-fi novels have succeeded despite larger conceptual problems -- but with the rest of the mechanics decidedly lackluster, the core set of manic financial musings need to be better than they are.

Stross's impressive level of output and real talent for creative thinking seems to be securing him a place in a canon, so if he were ever to read my advice, he should almost certainly ignore it. But I do wish he would slow down a little.
...more

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Jun 19, 2014 Ashley rated it really liked it

Shelves: award-winners, economics-and-business-and-junk, sci-fi, speculative, swashbucklers-capers-and-heists, thrillers, treasure-and-adventure, you-wrote-about-what-now

This book is drunk.

But like, bear with me and stuff, k? Because there are different types of drunk, and analogously speaking, this is one of the better ones. I’m not talking about one of those slurry, messy drunks, where you couldn’t find your own ass if somebody paid you to. And I’m not talking about mean drunks or black-out drunks or any of those other kinds of drunks that basically make you temporarily worthless as a human being. This is the kind of drunk where you’re only drunk enough to say This book is drunk.

But like, bear with me and stuff, k? Because there are different types of drunk, and analogously speaking, this is one of the better ones. I’m not talking about one of those slurry, messy drunks, where you couldn’t find your own ass if somebody paid you to. And I’m not talking about mean drunks or black-out drunks or any of those other kinds of drunks that basically make you temporarily worthless as a human being. This is the kind of drunk where you’re only drunk enough to say and do things you maybe otherwise wouldn’t say or do, and it’s the kind of drunk that ignites that little spark of creativity in your altered mind–maybe you end up naked on your front lawn draped artfully in toilet paper, or write an epic love poem in heroic couplets to that hot person you’ve been ogling for weeks and leave it drunkenly on their voicemail, or, maybe you decide to write a book about humanoid robots colonizing the galaxy 5,000 years in the future, and the main character is a banking historian, and won’t it be fun to give the reader lessons in economics and future space history but then also turn her into a mermaid?! And there are tiny little communists that live at the bottom of this ocean planet, but that’s not really important, moving on.

I may have switched over to Charles Stross being drunk instead of the book in the middle of that convoluted metaphor, but hopefully you get my drift anyway (and besides, who knows, maybe Stross WAS drunk; maybe he’s drunk RIGHT NOW).

Anyway, the book is drunk, also. It’s just like fuck you, I do what I want, and then it launches into a lecture about how money works in the future and about how debt is the way the universe works and blah blah space cons, and it is weirdly fascinating.

Also, I burst out laughing when the main character, Krina, says that she’s fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters, and how horrible that is, because true facts: life insurance underwriters are the worst. I know this from personal experience.

Okay, now I feel drunk.

So to sum up, this book is awesome but weird and people who don’t like weird things probably won’t like it, and people who do might like it a lot. I liked it a lot. It felt much more cohesive than Saturn’s Children (which takes place thousands of years before this one, so you don’t really need to read it, although it helps with context; I definitely spent way less time being confused in this one because I’d read the first one). Neptune’s Brood is not my favorite book ever, but I loved going on all those weird tangent trips with the narrator and I love mermaids also, and this review probably isn’t very helpful, but it’s what I’ve got, so I guess you can suck it and stuff. ...more

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May 27, 2014 Alex Ristea rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2014-hugo-nominees, science-fiction, standalone

Charles Stross’s name inevitably appears in SFF circles: he’s a prolific writer on top of numerous award ballots—one of those Legends with a capital L that you’ve heard about, but have never actually gotten around to reading (at least I hadn’t).

My first Stross novel went a lot better than expected (I am trying to read all of the 2014 Hugo Award nominees with an open mind, but two things were immediately against it: 1) it’s not a Fantasy novel and 2) it’s a damn tiny book. I make no apologies for Charles Stross’s name inevitably appears in SFF circles: he’s a prolific writer on top of numerous award ballots—one of those Legends with a capital L that you’ve heard about, but have never actually gotten around to reading (at least I hadn’t).

My first Stross novel went a lot better than expected (I am trying to read all of the 2014 Hugo Award nominees with an open mind, but two things were immediately against it: 1) it’s not a Fantasy novel and 2) it’s a damn tiny book. I make no apologies for my lack of impartialness).

Right off the bat it’s clear that Charles Stross can write. And I mean write. The language is both beautiful and precise, with nary a word wasted. It’s impressive how much he managed to fit into a paragraph, a chapter, a book.

You see, Charles Stross is not only serving you a prime cut of steak, but he’s also a master chef who knows how to grill it to perfection. Substance and execution come together in a way that few authors can ever manage.

That being said, the writing is tough. Not because of the language in a cuts-your-reading-speed-in-half way like Steven Erikson, but because of all the math, chemistry, physics, and general science-speak. You don’t need a college education to read Neptune’s Brood, but you sure as hell need one to have written it.

The biggest appeal of the whole book was imagining a future ruled by commerce (in a benign impartial sort of way where the math and equations rule, not greedy bankers). The marketing graduate in me constantly squeed at all the concepts about money and trade. If you’ve any inclinations whatsoever for financial markets, instruments, and incentives, this book is for you.

There are “character” books, “plot” books, and “idea” books and this one falls into the latter category by a parsec. Not to say that the characters or plot were flat, but it wasn’t the main focus. The neat thing about sliders like this is that if one category is good enough, the others don’t matter. (A character can be a total asshole as long as he’s competent and proactive, a plot can be unbelievable if it’s funny and entertaining, etc.).

One thing that turned me off at first were the info-dumps. Not just your amateurish slip of the pen, but full-on narrative breaks for espouncing on a topic. Like, CAPTAIN TO ENGINEERING, FULL STOP ON THE STORY, IT’S TIME TO EXPLAIN A CONCEPT OR FIVE.

It had me worried, but honestly worked in the end. It’s almost enough to make me revisit my opinion on info-dumps, because it was interesting to the point of not caring. Like reading a really fascinating article about science, or watching a documentary—it’s information that you’re glad to have absorbed.

In conclusion, Neptune’s Brood is a definite contender on this year’s Hugo ballot. Not my favourite book of the year, but a hard science novel worth your attention.
...more

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Jul 02, 2013 Janus rated it liked it

I'm a Stross devotee, and, as usual, I devoured this book almost immediately. And while the book isn't a failure — quite the opposite! — I can't help but feel disappointed.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who's read a Stross book before that he is, to say the least, good at futuristic finance. In just about all of his books, there is, inevitably, an creative, fascinating new economy on display, one perfectly matched to the far-flung worlds of tomorrow yet entirely unexpected. From the Ec I'm a Stross devotee, and, as usual, I devoured this book almost immediately. And while the book isn't a failure — quite the opposite! — I can't help but feel disappointed.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who's read a Stross book before that he is, to say the least, good at futuristic finance. In just about all of his books, there is, inevitably, an creative, fascinating new economy on display, one perfectly matched to the far-flung worlds of tomorrow yet entirely unexpected. From the Economy 2.0 of Accelerando to the Festival of Singularity Sky to the gaming cryptomarkets of Halting State, economics and trade have always been fascinating elements of his work.

Neptune's Brood is nothing but that element.

(view spoiler)[Its main character, Krina, is a mild-mannered historian of fraud, an academic caught up in...something. Her sibling, Ana, has disappeared. Frankly, all of this is, until the last quarter of the book, a sideshow to lectures on the workings of the world she lives in. I found the lectures on finance and fraud to be fascinating, but frustratingly bite-sized. Even beginning to figure out why what's going on matters, and reaching the next tantalizing parcel of infodump, became a major drive for me to continue reading.

In between said infodumps, (including some incredibly repetitious and pedantic ones on radioactivity) we follow Krina on her magical mystery tour of Dojima System in search of her missing sib. This is the other plot driver, but, in retrospect, I'm not sure it's as effective as intended, since Krina herself is not exactly engaging. There is never a single moment in the book where I can say Krina was genuinely happy. She smiles exactly three times (and is faking it for two of them, the better to manipulate the person she's smiling at), and while she's imminently relatable (thanks to the first-person narrative), as a character she still seems one-dimensional at worst and perpetually anxious at best. Her only major victory happens, quite literally, on the very last page of the book. We never see the aftermath, and are left dangling in an abrupt, unsatisfying ending.

The plotting, in retrospect, isn't the most top-notch either. Krina spends about a third of the book rattling around a bizarre spaceship chapel staffed with incredibly irritating people who boss her around, only to move to a pirate ship where people boss her around, and then another planet where people — you get the picture. The plot, in fact, could probably be condensed into a few paragraphs, almost all of them devoted to explaining financial instruments and FTL fraud. Krina's "story", though, would only be a few sentences.

All this makes Neptune's Brood sound like a particularly entertaining textbook. But the subject is so fascinating that it's all worth it. What is value? What is currency? What is debt? How does space actually work when there aren't any magic hyperdrives to swoop in and save the day? What would interstellar economics look like? What place does humanity, a squishy species at the best of times, have in a cold, vast universe made principally of impossibly large and empty space?

The answer is no place, which befits the book. There is no warmth in it, and very little fun. This is in sharp contrast to the first Freyaverse book, Saturn's Children, a pastiche of sexy 70s sci-fi that now seems almost rolicking in comparison. But in both books, the main character is a relatable pawn in others' schemes, pushed this way and that in the service of talking about what Stross thinks about the future. His message is clear: humanity should stay at home. Interstellar colonization is a crap-shoot. It's a big universe out there, and everyone, including our robotic descendants, hates us.

It's a fascinating idea, but I'm beginning to realize that's all it is: an extremely well-justified theory, in some eyes, but still just an idea. And for me, that's just not enough to drive a book, to make me feel as though I've learned something other than it's a crapsack world out there. I've met enough misanthropic nerds and misanthropic finance-heads to tire of their worldview, and seeing the two collide isn't about to endear it to me any more than it already has.

Luckily for Stross, his big ideas are big enough to make whole universes come alive. Whether or not I care about anyone in them, however, seems to be a story for another time.
(hide spoiler)]

3 stars: Despite its flaws, I liked it. 4 stars for ideas, 2 stars for everything else. A classic example of Big Idea Sci-Fi, in both its positives and its negatives. Recommended for sci-fi lovers and anyone interested in a vision of the future who has a high threshold for slogging through plot and lectures on nuclear reactions. ...more

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Jun 08, 2014 Jenny (Reading Envy) marked it as did-not-finish

Shelves: sci-fi-fantasy, hugo-winners-or-nominees, read2014

Abandoning 212 pages in. At first I thought this was so much better than Saturn's Children - fast-paced, interesting story, funny at times, creative setting within the freyaverse, pre-established. I was really into it for 95 pages. Then the author decided to stop writing the story and instead, went on and on about the economic system he'd created. He really wants the reader to understand his concept of Slow Money. I got it. I wanted to move on and tell me more during the story. But he kept stopp ...more

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Feb 24, 2017 Megan Baxter rated it really liked it

First of, I didn't realize until I had it out of the library that I had, yet again, managed to pick up a series midway through. I'm trying to get better at that - realizing it earlier and going back to read earlier books rather than diving in around the midpoint. However, it looked like this book, while it existed in the same universe as a previous book, happened about 400 years later. I figured that I could probably managed to muddle along.

Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to ...more

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Aug 16, 2013 Tudor Ciocarlie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: corina-new, 2013-my-best-of, hugo-2014

An extremely intelligent novel and an utterly brilliant read. Stross, for the first time in the history of science-fiction, really thinks about the economics of the interstellar travel and outer system colonization, and builds around it a fun and intelligent story. This is pure science-fiction at its best; with Neptune's Brood, Stross wrote possibly the best book of his incredibly diverse career.

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Jun 24, 2014 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Interstellar Nigerian scammers, post-human mermaids, robot pirate space-bats

Shelves: science-fiction, audiobook, robots, space-opera, economics, post-human

The Big Idea behind Neptune's Brood should immediately grab your interest: in a far, far future in which the android descendants of humanity have colonized the stars but not broken the light-speed barrier, the interstellar equivalent of the Nigerian 419 Scam is still going around.

Add to that: space mermaids, pirate spacebats, and robot assassins, and Neptune's Brood should have been fifteen kinds of awesome.

Alas, Stross, who is a clever, clever guy, drowned a lot of the awesome in monologues abo ...more

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Jul 03, 2013 Andrea rated it really liked it

Stross is getting better with each book. This post-human adventure is crammed full of clever, inventive, detailed habitats, spaceships, societies and their denizens. And it's a fun and exciting ride.

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Jul 16, 2013 Joshua rated it liked it

I had to push through this, which is not usually the way a Stross hits my brain. Still enjoyable. I will file with Stephenson's Baroque Cycle under "fiction with a surprising amount of banking-related content."

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Aug 14, 2013 Kris rated it it was ok

Woo, this was a rough one. I admire Charles Stross as a writer in terms of his prose, which is still mostly excellent, and his worldbuilding. You know how some people will say to an author "oh you're so imaginative!" and it always sounds so trite (at least to me, since we all have the potential to be imaginative)? Well, Charles Stross is one of those guys where it would be entirely appropriate. There is a lot of weird stuff going on here, starting with the space-going chapel. The bat insurance u Woo, this was a rough one. I admire Charles Stross as a writer in terms of his prose, which is still mostly excellent, and his worldbuilding. You know how some people will say to an author "oh you're so imaginative!" and it always sounds so trite (at least to me, since we all have the potential to be imaginative)? Well, Charles Stross is one of those guys where it would be entirely appropriate. There is a lot of weird stuff going on here, starting with the space-going chapel. The bat insurance underwriters. Oh, and of course, mermaids. Gotta have mermaids.

Unfortunately, other than admiring its craft, I did not really enjoy this book. It was a struggle to read, for several reasons. Let's start out with the fact that it's set in the same universe as, but is not a sequel to, Saturn's Children. It takes place thousands of years later, but does not address the fate of the characters from that book, nor even reference or hat tip a single thing from it. This would be a rather minor annoyance if the novel was a solid tale of its own, but unfortunately...

I had trouble engaging with the plot. It hinges on the economics of a society that spends long periods of time traveling between the stars. Which can be really interesting, as it's a topic not oft addressed in science fiction. I admire Stross for tackling this difficult subject. Unfortunately, the difficulty shows in the book as even he struggles to explain all the economics of "slow money" and accrued societal debt and bonds and oh... I don't know. I think I sort of get it now, but in order to get this far he had to spend a lot of time explaining it. And explaining it again. And again. There are quite a few points where the book pauses to explain some minutia of space economics, and it just grinds the story to a halt. I found it disappointing after being delighted at how well he was able to slip in hard science and historical infodumps into Saturn's Children. The worst part here is that he does actually repeat a lot of infodumps, both of a economical nature but also some character things (Krina repeatedly talks about her birth and upbringing as if she hadn't already explained it before).

I also feel like the plot didn't jell together that well. It feels like he had a lot of neat ideas and concepts that he wanted to work into a novel, but he didn't have a plan about how to tie it all together, making it up as he went along writing the novel. No plot points get dropped, but it feels like they get crammed into roles where they don't entirely fit in an attempt to tie up all loose ends. Except of course, I feel like not everything was tied up. What exactly was Deacon Dennett up to (smuggling?), and how did it tie into what the church was doing at the end (if at all)? And what about Andrea?

And that's probably my biggest issue with the novel, and it's the same problem I had with its predecessor. It just ends, with no proper denouement for the characters, cutting off just as things start to get more interesting or change dramatically. It's the same problem I had with Saturn's Children, and it wouldn't be an issue at all if this book continued the story from that, even in a small way. It doesn't, which means that if there's a third book (and I'm pretty sure there will be, given the developments at the end of this novel), it won't continue this story. Which makes the ending disappointing, but perhaps it's a small relief to know I won't have to read pages and pages about insurance policies and financial fraud again. ...more

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Aug 03, 2013 Michael Burnam-Fink rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2013, sci-fi

This is Stross's Strossiest book since Accelerando. The Big Ideas are still there, but this time instead of Singularitarian enthusiasm and terror, Stross has woven a thriller about the intricacies of interstellar finance. Nominally a sequel to Saturn's Children, it is both much better and stands entirely on its own.

It's the deep future, and humanity is long-dead, replaced by robot with nanotech bodies and very human minds (messing with autonomic nervous systems tends to wind up in bad ways). Kri ...more

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Aug 18, 2015 Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, humour, science-fiction

Charles Stross is a genius. In "Saturn's Children" and "Neptune's Brood" he has created a universe of everyday surreality populated by metahumans. Who else could possibly dream up a mindbendingly, superfast space opera centred round interstellar banking, bit coinage and accounting? Who else would dream of establishing such a glorious adventure on a Ponzi scheme? Indeed, who else would make a scholar of the historiography of accountancy the heroine of this universe peopled with "robotised" exoske ...more

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Jun 10, 2014 Elisabeth rated it did not like it

Shelves: did-not-finish

I received the first 100 pages of this book as part of the Hugo voters packet, but I only made it to page 46.

Harlan Ellison once used the phrase 'obscurantist drivel.' A bit harsh maybe, but that's the phrase that kept occurring to me as I was reading. I don't mind dense writing and detailed worldbuilding - Dune is one of my all-time favorites, after all - but it seems like Stross is dense just to be dense. Like he thinks his world will seem more rich for being incomprehensible. His writing is f ...more

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Aug 10, 2014 SciFi Kindle rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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 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. ...more

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Jul 22, 2013 Paige Ellen Stone rated it it was amazing

Simply, utterly brilliant storytelling and writing from one of the best "hard" sci-fi writers of our day. In the midst of telling a compelling story of the future of humans millenia from now, Stross tackles, invents, whatever, the future of intergalactic monetary systems in a time when bank transfers can take years (standard time) to be completed. Humans are no longer "Fragile" but are bio-nano technological wonders who can have many "iterations," sometimes several at once, if desired.
This is a ...more

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Apr 20, 2014 Laura rated it it was ok

Shelves: science-fiction, hugo-nominee

I would have enjoyed this book more if I had begun reading at Part II.

Part I: Incoming (1 star, noting that my reason for one star will be someone else's reason for five.)

The imagry was repellant. For the first 100 pages you are immersed in an H.L. Geiger painting (*shivers*). The writing style that said "this book is only for uber-intelligent readers" was at first amusing, playing to the readers pride that they get all the obscure stuff - but after 50 pages I was tired and annoyed, and the stor ...more

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Aug 20, 2013 John Carter McKnight rated it liked it

Solid Stross, more reminiscent of Accelerando than his books of the past 5 years or so. Set in the same universe as Saturn's Children, but not a sequel... unfortunately.

It may be that one can like Saturn's or Neptune's, but not both: I'll be interested to hear what other Stross fans have to say. Neptune's is clever, tightly plotted, with a much more tidy ending than Stross tends to. My problem was, after the Church-starship arrived at its destination about 80 pp in, I just didn't care anymore. ...more

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Jun 07, 2015 Eric rated it it was ok

Recommended to Eric by: Chris Bauer

Shelves: book-club, science-fiction

This is the second thing I have tried reading by Charles Stross. Both this and The Rapture of the Nerds, which Stross co-wrote with Cory Doctorow, were other people's book club picks, and I had similar reactions to both. They were just too weird for me, and I didn't finish either. When you combine the space travel, the metahumans, the elaborate system of currency linked with time, the flying spaceship temple, the pirate insurance agents, etc., it just became too much to wrap my head around. And ...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Jonathan Strahan rated it really liked it

I'm currently over half way through Charlie Stross's second "Freyaverse" novel, and loving it.

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Jan 02, 2014 Alan rated it liked it

Recommends it for: Policy wonks

Recommended to Alan by: Its whiz-bang predecessor

Although Neptune's Brood is nominally a sequel to Charles Stross' late-period Heinlein homage Saturn's Children, and the books are set in more-or-less the same universe, there are otherwise few similarities between the two. As if aping its namesake planet, Neptune's Brood is both colder and more remote than its predecessor. This shows up in several ways—physically (Saturn's Children was cozily confined almost entirely to our own Solar System, but its successor is set in multiple star systems, no ...more

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Jul 03, 2013 M rated it liked it

Still 3 stars, as it is good in the grand scheme of things, but I am currently battling hard with myself whether I want to ever read a Stross again:

the reason being that I start to think that Charles Stross is just taking the piss: I recently read his thoughts on this book and am currently not sure whether I think Charles is just more honest than other authors or an extremely unlikable arrogant rip-off.
He basically admits that the book was rushed, written for money only, the plot not very well t ...more

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Jul 21, 2013 Andrew rated it liked it

Krina Alizond is an itinerant scholar, a student of economics in an interstellar (but STL) posthuman civilization. That's "posthuman" in the literal sense; metahumanity does not have access to infinite resources, unbounded intelligence, or godlike abilities. They're just the folks who hung around after homo sapiens went extinct. They're somewhat tougher and much more radiation-resistant than us, which makes interstellar colonization possible -- though still a royal pain in the ass. And expensive ...more

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Aug 12, 2013 Tom Tresansky rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Not at the same level as Saturn's Children...largely due to the main character having pretty much 0 personality or internal dialogue.

The water world setting was unique, but underutilized. The first third on the Church-ship was better than the rest. The space battle at the end was too abbreviated to be satisfyingly climactic, the end itself was such a hard stop I almost fell out of my seat; literally not a single word of denouement.

Stross is occasionally inventive as ever, but many of the best id ...more

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Jan 06, 2014 Roy rated it really liked it

I usually buy Charlie Stross's stuff as soon as it appears, but I held off Neptune's Brood as the previous in this series, Saturn's Children, really did not appeal to me at all.

However, Neptune's Breed proved to be much more to my taste. Set in the sane post-human world, but thousands of years later with, as far as I can see, no overlapping characters from the previous book, Neptune's Brood has all Stross's usual excellent world-building and meditations on how things /really/ work, but a pace ju ...more

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Aug 12, 2013 Michael Hirsch rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

I'm always excited when I find a new novel by Stross. He is without a doubt one of the most creative and thoughtful writers. This book is a sequel,of sorts, to 'Saturn's Children'. I say 'of sorts' because it takes place roughly 10,000 years later and doesn't
t have any character's in common. And that's a good thing. IMO 'Saturn's Children' was one of Stress' weakest novels. This one is much better.

The book is an exploration of the economics of a galactic economy without FTL travel. The protagoni ...more

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Apr 26, 2014 Nicholas Whyte rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, hugo, 2014, 1405, xz

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2292421.html[return][return]It's set in the same universe as Saturn's Children but that really doesn't matter, as it's a very different book - unusually for SF (though much less unusually for Stross) one of the central themes is future economics, specifically the issue of currency and cash flow between worlds which are separated by light years and where information cannot be transferred faster than the speed of light. On top of a decent plot, there is an excellent u ...more

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Jul 19, 2013 Richard rated it it was amazing

How many other great interstellar banking novels can you think of... Or even poor ones. This is wonderful space opera and it is also hard sci-fi, currencies, trading and insurance all based around moving information at the speed of light. The book is classic wonderfully written Charles Stross with communist squid, privateer insurance sales bats and a soulful chaste mermaid bank fraud historian as the protagonist. It is also a tail of a naive daughter freeing her from her mothers coat tails and l ...more

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Jul 01, 2013 Mitchell rated it really liked it

Shelves: economics, library, science-fiction, fiction, liked-reviews, published-2013, four-star

An android based space opera with a heavy accounting slant set around leverage style cons and long cons. This book was not a little confusing and at times hard to take. The first half was especially bizarre - I think this book may have been extremely brilliant but perhaps too brilliant for me. Not a good starting point for getting in to Charles Stross. Definitely an odd one and YMMV from page to page because mine certainly did.

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About Charles Stross

Charles Stross

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Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams and Richard Morgan.

SF ...more