Charles Stross : Neptune's Brood

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

Gareth Powell : Ack-Ack Macaque

Book Review : Pulp sci-fi fun with added monkeys

In an alternative future where England and France joined to form a union in the 1950s, a journalist seeks to track down whoever murdered her husband, the young heir to the throne is on the run after discovering a dark secret. Throw into the mix a cigar smoking, swearing, monkey with a penchant for banana daiquiris (who would surely be voiced by Ron Perlman in any film adaptation) who flies a Spitfire and battles Nazi ninjas and a conspiracy theory that threatens the future of humanity and you have quite a heady brew.

Alternative realities! Virtual worlds! Airships! Explosions! Talking monkeys! Ack-Ack Macaque crams so many pulp elements together that at times it feels like its about to burst at the seams.

Luckily the book just about holds itself together. Throwing so many ideas around with reckless abandon, it sometimes feels like the narrative is moving too fast, and ideas or concepts that I would quite happily have spent more time finding out about speed past in a blur. With a structure built around a series of cliffhangers, occasionally plot points seem to pop up from nowhere, or end abruptly.

The joy end exuberance of the writing, characters and story swept me along until the end and helped gloss over most of the shortcomings of the novel, but it did leave me with the lingering suspicion that Ack-Ack Macaque was slightly less than the sum of its parts. Like an action movie that is more style than substance, it might be best not to think too hard about, but just sit back and enjoy the ride.