Book Review : Accountants In Space!
A thrilling tale of intrigue, betrayal and interstellar accountancy, Neptune’s Brood mixes hard science, pulp plotting and economics of space travel with reckless abandon.
Neptune’s Brood tells the story of Krina, a post-human in the distant future, an accountant and specialist in fraud, as she searches for her missing sister. She gets drawn into a web of conspiracy and a galaxy wide con job that could threaten the fabric of the economy of star systems. Soon Krina is kidnapped, chased by assassins, arrested and has a run in with an accounting firm with heavy weaponry.
I’ve been a big fan of Charles Stross’s novels for a long time now, but I’ve much preferred his Laundry novels (James Bond meets HP Lovecraft with a side order of extra geekiness) to his sci-fi tales. However, Neptune’s Brood (which is a set in the same universe but not a sequel to Stross’s earlier novel Saturn’s Children) was immense fun.
The fundamentals of the galactic economy that are the basis of the novel took me a little while to get my head around, involving slow, medium and fast money, but Krina fills in the details as the plot unfolds. Stross writes with a keen eye for the ludicrous but the novel never slips into parody. Weird characters and settings just enhance the oddness of the far future, from deep sea-dwelling squid humans who mine radioactive volcanoes to deranged post humans who are transporting the bones of ‘Fragiles’ as they call the original humans in a space going church. There’s even space for a Monty Python reference to be thrown in.
If you like your space opera full of action and adventure, with a dash of thought provoking social commentary (the economics of space travel in this book and the way debt is passed on from generation to generation) the I can’t recommend Neptune’s Brood enough
