Neptune's Brood

Having read ‘Saturn's Children', I was looking forward to this book as it was set in the same universe.

I was expecting a fun, sci-fi yarn but instead received an intricate and in-depth manifesto on banking and finance working across the vast distances of space and planets, with a story added on almost as an afterthought.

The very basic plot was rather dull and the characters were wafer-thin and instantly forgettable. The book was very hard going and I had to push myself at times to keep reading, hoping and praying that a seam of gold would soon appear and all of the groundwork and Basil Exposition would have been worthwhile.

Sadly, it never really happened and the book felt like reading the small print on the bottom of a loan or insurance application. In space.

This story has a lot of great ideas in it, depicting a future with interstellar, but not FTL, travel and a number of characters radically modified from the original human form. The water world on which much of it is set is also intriguing, based in part on some real-world theories as to what such worlds may be like (i.e. a bit different to those in much standard sci-fi fare).

One of the main themes, however, is the financial system, necessarily adapted to vastly long travel times. The central character is a financial historian, dedicated to the study of a particular kind of fraud that forms much of the plot. As such, there is rather a lot of discussion of economics in the book - whopping great chunks of it at times - and it's these that prevent me from giving the book a 5/5.

It's undeniably inventive, and the plot is actually pretty good, with a fair bit of action and some good characterisation in amongst all the ideas, economic and otherwise. But it is, at heart, an “ideas book”, and, while I loved the science, how much you enjoy the book overall may depend in large part on how much speculative economics you're prepared to put up with.

I'd say that if I had had the money to register for the Hugo Awards this year, I would have had a dead heat between this book and Ancillary Justice. Both books are impressive SF investigative thrillers, and both have gripping stories with interesting characters and equally interesting ideas. In the case of Neptune's Brood, the idea is basically building a Space Opera thriller around the old investigative axiom of “Follow the money,” and it works incredibly well. It's got adventure, pirates, mermaids, zombies, and transhumanism, all wrapped up in one glorious adventure.

I'm almost glad that I didn't have the ability to vote for the Hugo Awards this year, as I wouldn't know which one to choose.