Neptune's Brood pretends to be a sci-fi novel. But it is not. It's fooling you!

Oh, sure, it has all the trappings of one. It takes place many light-years from Earth, in a galaxy where baseline humans (known to their posthuman heirs as 'the Fragile') have gone extinct three times and counting. The primary form of interstellar travel is to aim your bitstream at another star system via communications laser and spend years in transit. Everyone keeps a secondary backup soul instantiated elsewhere, just in case. It has space pirate accountants. It has water worlds (where the mermaids mine the nuclear rocket fuel!) and communist squid nations. It has cyborg zombies caused by bit rot. The hardest of hard sci-fi rules are in play; it takes a lot of delta-vee to get anything physical anywhere. Space is a dangerous place full of cosmic radiation and planets that are Not Like Earth and is no fit place for fleshy sacks of mostly water who quickly turn into tumor-riddled corpses if they venture out beyond the Van Allen belts.

But for all that, as I said, it's not a sci-fi novel.

This is a crime novel.

Take a classic confidence trick. In this case, it's the Spanish Prisoner, or more precisely, the current equivalent; the Advance Fee fraud.

Then update it with the structure, language, and most importantly the morality of modern financial services. The last part is key; the antagonists of Neptune's Brood are fantastically wealthy, rulers of nations, and they did not get that way by being productive members of society.

Add it to your posthuman sci-fi setting. Mix in a dash of Hammet, a pinch of Westlake.

This is a story about crime. And debt. Oh, so much debt. Debt that literally destroys star systems and civilizations. And orphaned financial transactions. And the unholy lengths people (being posthuman, ironically, doesn't stop you from being a person; it just means you can be a person over several thousand years and multiple solar systems) will go to for just a few dollars more.

Much like its predecessor, Saturn's Children (in fact, much like practically all of Stross' canon) the real strength of Neptune's Brood isn't so much the story, which despite having many charming twists and turns to keep things fresh is very paint-by-numbers. It's the verisimilitude, the sheer amount of effort and love that's gone into crafting the setting and the plot and the way it teases it all out, practically forcing you to take an interest in just how this entire unholy edifice was erected and what the people trapped in it are going to do next.

This is a novel in which interstellar colonization is driven forward by debt-financed ponzi schemes, with whole solar systems unloading their debt obligations onto their colonies which will, in turn, unload their debt onto their colonies. They've invented a special kind of currency to denominate this kind of debt in, in fact! They more or less had to.

This is a novel in which, after a crime boss is unfortunately harpooned through the head and dumped into the ocean, instead of that being the end of it, we are then treated to five pages of meticulously researched and one-hundred-percent scientifically accurate description of what happens to a humanish body as it descends through about a hundred kilometers of ocean, being slowly ripped apart by pressure and encountering some interesting temperature bands and underwater topography before what's left of his skull comes to settle on the silt. And it ends up being completely fascinating.

This is a novel where the MacGuffin treasure is a financial instrument. The fabled Atlantis Carnet represents the entire lost investment wealth of a star system, left orphaned after its civilization collapsed. Or perhaps... was made to collapse.

(This is a real thing that happens in the real world, by the way. Financial instruments become orphaned all the times for a variety of reasons, usually people dying, and acquiring legal title of both the party and if necessary counterparty of the orphaned transaction or asset and then laying claim to it is something banks actually do. It can be pretty lucrative in the aggregate, in fact.)

How do you hide the fact that you looted the wealth of a whole civilization? Well... you launder it by starting a whole bunch of other civilizations, of course. Reassembling the Atlantis Carnet could cause the civilizations that were created to hide that stolen wealth (and, in fact, the entire interstellar banking system) to collapse as well. The people who burned down a whole solar system to run the greatest Advance Fee fraud of all time are not too pleased about that.

In short, this is a novel that kicks ass. If anything I've just said sounds like it's your bag of tea, you should most certainly read it.

Caveats, if you are not already familiar with the oeuvre of Charlie Stross: the man does not have a romantic bone in his body. Not about fantasy, or science-fiction, or espionage, or any of the other genres he typically works in. This is super hard sci-fi, with a great deal of thought and care given to building a workable, real setting from the ground up, inhabited by at least theoretically real people. Nothing in it was put in just to be cool. Plenty of things in it are cool, but they were never put in there just to be so.

It's also pretty posthuman. There are no humans in the book, and in fact within the setting regular humans are regarded as obsolete and having no business being in space at all. (Like I said; Stross isn't romantic about spaceflight. Or anything.) The book has plenty of people in it, mind you. People don't stop being people just because they're running on a digital platform instead of an analog one. But no humans. And the posthuman weirdness will stare you in the face on a regular basis, practically daring you to blink. Stross is sort of the opposite of John Scalzi in that way; where Scalzi writes to be deliberately accessible, Stross will never pull a punch.

It's pretty awesome.

* * *

Some additional background information, for those that care about this sort of trivia. This absolutely won't make any sense at all unless you're already familiar with Charlie's work and care about knowing something about his process.

The genesis of Neptune's Brood goes back to the real world going "Ha ha, fuck YOU" to Stross' attempt to write a sequel to Halting State. Halting State, despite it's intensely weird second-person perspective storytelling, turned out to be a surprise smash hit for Stross; it went through three printings before even hitting store shelves. His publishers were therefor eager for a sequel, and Stross decided to tee up a cybercrime novel, one in which financial institutions conspired to rip off the World Bank and the IMF to the tune of multiple billions of dollars with the biggest Advance Fee fraud ever conceived.

Then 2008 rolled along and it, uh, turned out actual, for-real financial institutions were conspiring to steal trillions of dollars from... well, from everyone. And suddenly the Halting State sequel seemed kind of penny-ante. Twenty billion dollars is not a lot of money when financial institutions are out there looting on that scale.

Stross got caught up in his Merchant Princes and Laundry Files universe, and eventually did (contractual obligation, you know) cobble together a sequel to Halting State in the form of Rule 34. But he had all these notes about running Advance Fee cons, and he really wanted to write about one being done on a grand scale. His Merchant Princes setting is all about high finance, but only in the context of developing nations; there was no appropriate place to plug it in. Halting State's near-future universe was already starting to look not much like the future we're actually getting. (Tommorrowland Syndrome.) So... Saturn's Children, which already had a setting about manipulating and exploiting people in it ended up being the natural choice.

So that's how that happened.

-Merc
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