Waterstones Neptune's Brood
720 ratings
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Price: £11.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Neptune's Brood is a brand new space opera from science fiction legend Charles Stross. Shortlisted for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the Hugo Award for Best Novel. She was looking for her sister. She found Atlantis. Krina Alizond is a metahuman in a universe where the last natural humans became extinct five thousand years ago. When her sister goes missing, she embarks on a daring voyage across the star systems to find her, travelling to her last known location - the mysterious water-world of Shin-Tethys. In a universe with no faster-than-light travel that's a dangerous journey, made all the more perilous by the arrival of an assassin on Krina's tail, by the 'privateers' chasing her sister's life insurance policy and by growing signs that the disappearance is linked to one of the biggest financial scams in the known universe.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9780356501000
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9780356501000
Author: Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk
Rating: 5
Review: Charles Stross is a genius. In "Saturn's Children" and "Neptune's Brood" he has created a universe of everyday surreality populated by metahumans. Who else could possibly dream up a mindbendingly, superfast space opera centred round interstellar banking, bit coinage and accounting? Who else would dream of establishing such a glorious adventure on a Ponzi scheme? Indeed, who else would make a scholar of the historiography of accountancy the heroine of this universe peopled with "robotised" exoskeletons of the Fragile (that's us, ordinary humans, by the way), mermaids and piratical space-bat underwriters? Stross writes so well, with humour mixed in with electrifying pace... Don't forget to breathe in at the end of each chapter! He sprinkles gems along the way: "... please take the glue-gun kit and proceed to Mausoleum Companionway Three...", "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.", "Death is really no more than the voluntary liquidation of an economy of microscopic free agents, the redemption of the debt of structured life." and my favourite, "The difference between merchant banking and barefaced piracy is slimmer than most people imagine." And now I think about it I was foolish to scoff at that possible career in accountancy and banking....
Author: t33ch
Rating: 3
Review: Not sure if this should be 3 or 4 stars... A good story and worth a read. My only gripes (here's but 1) are that some of the economic explanations are repeated which is really irritating, it's like those TV programs where they spend the first 5 minutes after a commercial break reminding you what happened before the 3 minute break in case you have the attention span of a fruit fly. My other gripe (but 2) is the 'extras' at the end. I thought that I had another 15 pages to go so my mind was racing ahead wondering what the climax would be when I realised that I had just stumbled over the climax. I'm not sure if this is the sole reason that I found the ending slightly underwhelming, but it was (for me). Overall the concept and characters are interesting and well fleshed out. Though I've only given it 3 stars, it's worth a read.
