The plot's boring and the ending is abrupt. Stross repeatedly reuses archaic words in a word-of-the-day-calendar sort of mode ('barratry', 'demesne'). 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). The approach prioritizes creativity over craft, and I find it kind of irksome. 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. That's the best explanation I have for books like Neptune's Brood. In other words a fantastic ride.Ĭharles Stross is brilliant and prolific and maybe a bit lazy. During the reading, it was a strange mixture of mendicant scholastics, financial mechanics, dancing skeletons, mermaids, and deep, deepwater squids harvesting rich uranium salts from an ocean world.

In reflection, I'm likely to giggle about this one. Not only were the ideas interesting, but the tale was very humorous at a distance. It was certainly amusing we're referred to as 'The Fragile' because we break so damn easily.

Make no mistake, it's a heist novel, but it happens to be populated by post-humanity robots in an interstellar empire with insurance agents who are pirates, where faster-than-light promises are the best confidence scams, and extinct humanity is gestated in church-owned vats and revered before they're sent to die upon colony worlds as the nominal passed-on wish of humanity's deep past. 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. In fact, I've been enjoying a lot of financial chicanery novels over the last decade and a half. Stross blew my mind with Accelerando, but the merchant novels were quite good as well, and one should never forget Rule 34. It's not for everyone, but I personally love financial sci-fi stories.

Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross