Book review: Neptune's brood

[Originally: https://wmconnolley.livejournal.com/32970.html]

Read again: no.
Do I regret spending my time on this book: a bit.
Interest / Ideas / Novelty: moderate to good.

As usual, I'll give a way more of the plot that you'd welcome were you actually wondering about reading this book, so don't read past this introductory paragraph if you want to actually enjoy the surprises in the book. Not that there are many. Potted summary (without revealing stuff): its an innocent-abroad-stumbling-into-deep-mysteries base plot, in the same humans-are-extinct universe as "Saturn's children". Like SC that universe-idea is rather dissatifyingly handled / inadequately exploited, in that its possible to transcribe essentially all the story onto base-human terms; those rather few bits that you couldn't, directly, aren't terribly important to the plot. The nice bit is that its a far-future-with-no-FTL plot; post-humans are spreading, slowly, but in the semi-staple-of-scifi long term spaceships boosted to a few percent of lightspeed by launch lasers, so that colonisation is slow and interstellar commerce is in information not materials. That's good, and its a promising start. He allows himself a cheat: the post-people's minds can be stored in "soul chips" and they can be transmitted between the stars, to be reformed on arrival. And the book, in a sense, is about a possible sketch of how the economics of all this might work; together with a plot about how fraud might work.

Stross's Neptune's Brood: science fictional companion to Graeber's Debt (if I was writing this in 2024, I'd note that Graeber's Debt is AFAIK junk) is a review by Cory Doctorow; you might prefer his version. He says The ideas are so plentiful and the story revolves around such a baroque future that sometimes the story itself gets lost amid the argument. That's correctish, but over-polite: more accurate would be to say that attempting to explain the economic concepts used in the book - slow money, exchange-signing - is sufficiently complex that it can't be done unobtrusively; there are big wodges of the central character talking straight to the reader.

A few holes in the book:

* although its a grand-sweep-of-history type book, at least at the start, in the end the vast conspiracy turns out to be disappointingly personal, almost one-person. The justification for that is that it would be hard wrap up the novel otherwise; but it comes far too close to making the whole sweep of history dependent on one person, which isn't believeable.
* the ending is very abrupt (as this review says). Its as though, having used up all his ideas, he couldn't be bothered to finish up writing a proper ending. In some ways that's good - he's not wasting your time - but it diminishes the book. Again, the manner of the ending - here we have a giant battleship / industrial complex, launched 2kyr ago, with scary custom-designed fighting folk, suddenly overwhelmed in a twinkling. Such a structure would have better defences (the excuse for surprise - that they're sneaking up in a blind spot - is laughably thin); but I also don't buy the idea that it would have gone undetected itself; there's vast swathes of plausible-civilisation-infrastructure omitted / evaded.
* sending people by transmitting their mind state is cheating, I think. I was going to say its necessary for the book, and the in-universe, but now I wonder. Its necessary for the personalisation of the ending, but (see above) the ending is weak anyway. I think the book could have done without it. I don't believe you could get the interstellar bandwidth, but more important is the what-do-you-do-about-the-multiple-instantiation problem.
* although the concept of slow money is moderately well worked out (well ter be 'onest, guv, I wasn't really paying attention, just surfing on the ideas) what isn't worked out at all is how the fraud might work. That's all waves-hands-coughs-in-embarrassment type stuff.
* Something that isn't a hole, but is very briefly mentioned at the end, is "well, was this vast fraud so evil then"? In terms of the book, it lead to a vast wave of colonisation - surely a good thing. It suppressed the new AFAL drive, but that was semi-incidental sort of; indeed the AFAL is another one of the book's cheats; so pretend a universe where the whole thing was just a scam, then you can wonder: but was it a good thing? This matters, because at the end its necessary that the scammers be Bad.

So, overall, I'm disappointed. I'm still waiting for the no-FTL-no-new-physics book (its allowed to have new bio, though, so I don't mind people living a long time) that plausibly depicts an interstellar civilisation.