Review: Neptune's Brood

I've been terribly lax about reviewing things, anymore. I set up "Strangely Random Stuff" in part to separate my review posts from my political posts, but then I sort of failed to hold up my reviewing end. I think the problem is that I tend to be a more enthusiastic reviewer than a slagger; I like pasing on that I found a movie or a book or a product to be really good, as a service to the consumer, while finding that slagging a work I find substandard has a gratuitous feel to it.

If you have any sense of my personality, this insight probably doesn't synch. It strikes me as a weird quirk, as well.

That said, I read Stross' Neptune's Brood about a month ago, and was only jogged into remembering to write a review when I came across PZ Myers' review of the same.  Myers, naturally, was taken with the image of a communist squid-folk society.

I can't say I blame him. I am down with the squid, myself, and an oceanic socialism. I am likewise down with Stross. And I didn't dislike the book at all--oh no. There is naturally some slightly warped humor (is a piratical assurance agency Monty Python enough for you?) and the world-building framework of the Freyaverse, even a few generations down the line, makes sense. But I did find a bit of a peculiarity that I thought might be more something I would enjoy, and not necessarily everyone else:

You know how some works of sf go on about rocket ships and how the drives allegedly would work and maybe mention robots or some other tech in plausible detail to make you feel like "Oh yes. I see how that works." Well, Stross has dug a bit onto intergalactic finance and world-building economies. Space, if you hadn't heard, is big. And someone has to pay for going into it and doing things with bits of it. And the transactions occuring in an interstellar economy would be taking place over in some cases enormous distances and lengths of time that would even be shocking to a very long-lived android.

I have to congratulate Stross for really writing a work that is mindcandy for econowonks. I thought it was fun and fascinating and maybe a bit better than Saturn's Children, in the sense that I wasn't comparing it to Heinlein's Friday the whole time. It is quite different, and I rather liked it. It's just a bit hard to review.

If you like sf with a heavy dose of economics, this is probably your kind of jawn.