Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Ace Books, 2013; $25.95 hc; 325 pages
The reader beginning Charles Stross’s recent novel will soon find the subtitle a bit disingenuous, or, shall we say, wryly ironic. Neptune’s Brood is indeed a space opera in that it features interstellar travel, a spread of civilization from Ancient Earth to colonies scattered up to 50 light years away in any direction, and at least one warship, not to mention pirate raids, daring escapes, and the like. But it is also a work of hard science fiction, and much of the (social) science is economics: surely no sf novel has had a plot more centrally extrapolated from banking and currency systems.
Neptune’s Brood is the second of the prolific Mr. Stross’s novels about a particular posthuman universe (2008’s Saturn’s Child was the first) as I’ve learned from the blurbs. I must confess that NB is the first work of his I’ve read, a fact that should either disqualify me from writing a serious review or put me in the perfect position to appreciate it as a discrete work of art. In any case, NB is a stand-alone novel set centuries in the future after Saturn’s Child, and it is quite exhilaratingly funny and suspenseful though a slow read for two separate reasons. One is the delight to be taken in some of Stross’s prose, including the dialogue: one is invited to savor many a sentence or to spot playful allusions. (More on this later.) The other reason is because there is so much exposition scattered throughout the entire novel—not only backstories (for we begin very much in medias res) but planetary environments, shipboard designs, banking systems, and the physics and economics of interstellar travel—that one can’t exactly call this book a page-turner. For some readers all this backtracking and filling-in will be a turnoff, but I appreciated Stross’s ingenuity in constructing such an elaborate fictional universe—i.e., both the setting itself and the narrative intricacies of its thriller/intrigue plot—that he poses himself interesting problems in getting everything across to us in some kind of reasonable order.
That plot is centered upon a post-human female named Krina Alizond-114, a “scholar of the historiography of accountancy practices” (16) or more simply “a historian who works for a bank” (28)—i.e., for Sondra Alizond-1, her “lineage mater.” Since we human beings of Ancient Earth—“Fragiles,” as our bionic descendants will call us—are ill-suited to space travel, and since drastic biological modifications of the human body are becoming more and more possible and affordable even in our own time, we should not be surprised that our descendants or robot replacements, if you prefer, will be composed of mechanocytes rather than cells. How the ’cytes work and what they enable a body to do and endure is described in far too much detail to recount here. But I must mention—because it is vital to both the nature of interstellar colonization and the intricacies of the plot—that metahumans are somehow “instantiated” rather than born. They have removable “soul chips” inside their skulls: a sort of portable hard drive that can be electronically transmitted to beacons in distant star systems, where one’s “soul,” along with a spare chip that can contain all sorts of encrypted information, including financial data, can be downloaded into a newly built, more or less identical body.
Such transmissions are essential to interstellar settlements because in the universe of this novel faster-than-light travel for solid bodies is, as far as science can determine, still impossible. Starships—enormous and enormously expensive crafts taking decades to build and centuries to reach their destinations, containing hundreds of crew members and storing thousands of soul chips of specialized workers waiting to be downloaded on the new worlds—travel at only 1 percent of the speed of light. (That’s 6.7 million miles per hour, but still, even neighboring Proxima Centauri is almost 24 trillion miles from Earth.) Thus, one of the first things spacefarers do upon reaching their new home is build a beacon that will put them in “instant” (well, speed-of-light) communication with nearby star systems to negotiate loans and beam in additional colonists. (No nonearthly intelligent life forms have been found in these interstellar realms.) Good thing that metahumans live to be centuries old, even millennia if they can afford the repairs, considering the vast time spans of space travel. Indeed, the strange sense of things happening both very slowly and extremely rapidly is a major part of the experience of this novel.
The tale is narrated by Krina (except for a few passages tracking the progress of her doppelganger assassin or other antagonists, but never mind them for now), addressing a future “Reader” who may be either one of her own sisters or a complete stranger, and if the latter is “wondering ... why I am so desperate to get to Shin-Tethys that I am willing to work my passage on a damaged church run by a mad priest who is trying to simultaneously integrate multiple death-traumatized personalities, well—it’s a long story” (28). As the novel opens, she has just landed, i.e., downloaded or “decanted,” on Taj Beacon, a kind of space station/port city in itself, en route to a planet in the Dojima System (named, I assume, after the Dojima Rice Exchange, the Japanese forerunner to a modern banking system). She is seeking her sister, or “sib,” Ana Graulle-90, both instantiated from Sondra, a zillionaire tycoon who lives aboard New California, a “permanent spacegoing ark” or “self-propelled world-ship” (46). Ana has gone missing on Shin-Tethys, a water-covered planet with hundreds of civilizations descended from the original colonists, living in watery “layers”: some floating on the surface, others inhabiting deeper and deeper layers, and all biologically modified to suit their conditions (e.g., by becoming fish-tailed or even squid-shaped in the case of deep-water denizens who tend the harvesting of radioactive natural resources). To explain exactly why Krina is seeking Ana would require a review that would begin to approach the length of the novel itself—which is one of the reasons I admire the intricate construction of Neptune’s Brood. I would also need to make many more digressions from the plot than I have already: except that they would not be true digressions, because all the information I’ve given and much more that I haven’t is not background but intimately bound up with the plot.
And I haven’t even begun to explain the centrality of future banking, accounting, debt, and currency to the novel. Suffice it to say for the moment that there are three kinds of “dollars” in this universe: fast money (pretty much like ours), medium (like our real estate, bonds, and heftier material possessions), and slow money, which is what is needed for the titanic costs of interstellar travel and setting up new civilizations. Slow dollars are lent and paid back over the course of centuries and even millennia and are not subject to fluctuation, inflation, and depression as fast dollars are, for reasons that have to do with those beacon transmissions that prove one is where one says one is. Connected to all of this is a possible scam of all scams, the proposal that someone has actually invented FTL travel, which if true would utterly transform the posthuman universe and shatter its banking system. How money-ravenous Sondra is bound up in all of this and why Krina and Ana are in desperate flight will not be revealed here.
Apropos money, Neptune’s Brood opens with an epigraph from David Graeber’s much-debated 2011 Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and evidently (to one who has only skimmed Graeber’s book) Stross has made serious use of it in developing his plot, based as strongly as it is on the incursion of debt as a means of interstellar settlement. Graeber admires the “everyday communism” of small communities sharing, and Stross seems to be expressing his own approval through the character Ana, who favors the “communism” of the empathic, good-natured squidfolk. Still, those creatures are not simply an ideal society: they are also dangerously gossipy and naïve, and the book is more interested in following the more individualistic Krina’s strand of the plot.
More important, I almost never had the sense that Stross’s book is polemical or smugly self-satisfied like a left-leaning equivalent of Ayn Rand and her sf disciples. To be sure, there are a couple of passages near the end where Ana sounds preachy and even Krina slips into pronouncements like “Goodwill: one of those things that bankers and accountants hate because it is so inevitably unquantifiable, existing only in the eye of the beholder” (288). And the book certainly expresses a millennial wish that debt could cease to exist—that a Jubilee of debt-forgiveness could be declared. But in the universe of this novel, that could only happen with the invention of lightspeed (or faster) travel. Rather than polemical, I found all the speculations about debt to be the necessary framework for an entertainingly baroque plot design. Graeber uses Hernando Cortes as an exemplar of European greed raised to mythic proportions, and Stross may have made Sondra in Neptune’s Brood a deliberate parallel, but storytellers have always used such treasure-pillaging monsters in heightening their tales.
Some of the other heightenings of Neptune’s Brood are to be found in the fanatically detailed settings, beginning with the “damaged church” mentioned in the earlier quotation. Following her arrival at Taj Beacon, anxious to get to Shin-Tethys quickly (a relative term, meaning about a year in this case), but not trusting herself to more local transmission for fear of interception or “shall we say, nonaccidental data corruption” (185), not to mention the expense, Krina hires herself out as a deckhand on a Chapel of the Church of the Fragile, whose purported mission is to bring Fragiles to the stars. Stross has great fun describing the Chapel and its crew, who have been severely damaged physically and psychically by a recent accident in space. The ship looks like a floating Gothic church, except that its “stone blocks had aerogel cores as light as soap bubbles and as strong as diamond; the ‘mortar’ was a foamy aggregate of mecanocyte flesh wrapped around polyfullerene cables, ready to heal micrometeoroid damage” (33). Inside, its corridors are ossuaries, as in an earthly catacombs; the captain’s bridge is modeled after an organ loft; the acting captain, one Deacon Dennett, has robot assistants built from skeletons. (Krina first sees one of them as “a rattling rack of baroque calcified sticks. After a few seconds I recognized it to be a deceased Fragile structural core returned to implausible life” [17].) Much later we learn that although the ship has few conventional weapons, it can launch its “holy malware suite” against its enemies’ computers.
The Chapel chapters are filled with some rather loony details of everyday life on board. For example, Stross does not simply have a pair of characters enter the “refectory” where Krina is trying out the “tubespam”; rather, Deacon Dennett and the damaged “artificer-engineer” Father Gould blunderingly float in with Gould lashed by a tape to Dennett in the reduced gravity:
I say floated, but that gives rather the wrong impression—the deacon clearly anticipated his repast, but ... in his eagerness for traction, he lost ground, until he was reduced to flapping his arms and grabbing at the furniture. Meanwhile, Gould mumbled and gibbered incomprehensibly: The poor fellow was driving eight of the field-expedient drones [the skeletons] in parallel, and consequently had barely any cognitive bandwidth to spare for his own bodily needs. (50)
Soon we meet the Gravid Mother, who gives live births after being inseminated by the high priestess Cybelle (while enjoying sex on the side with the ship’s Cook). She is very like a character out of Alice in Wonderland, imperiously bossing Krina around. This whole episode climaxes as Cybelle, as a result of being too hastily repaired after severe damage from the accident, is charging through the corridors like a ravenous zombie, the doppelganger assassin is throwing knives at Krina, and a pirate ship is threatening to board the Chapel.
Another memorable setting is the pirate ship, or rather the privateer vessel commanded by insurance-fraud investigators (if there is indeed a meaningful difference), which takes Krina the rest of the way to Shin-Tethys. In charge is Count (i.e., Accountant) Rudi, whose crewmen do talk like pirates (“Resistance be futile!”), though Rudi himself is a slicker operator; he likes to calls himself “Chief Business Analyst Rudi the Terrible” and often seems “distantly amused” (255). Rudi and most of his crew are batlike—they have modified their bodies to have wing-like membranes to speed their movement through low-gee spaceship corridors—though what is functional about Rudi’s long snout and big teeth, rather like the Big Bad Wolf, I’m not sure.
The second half takes us deep below the surface of Shin-Tethys, starting with an ingenious technology allowing very rapid descent in a pod from Rudi’s ship to the watery surface of Shin-Tethys, much to the terror of the uninitiated Krina. The semi-submerged city of Nova Ploetsk and some of its denizens are presented in some detail, but much more hauntingly described is Krina’s descent, via mermaid-modification, to seemingly impossible depths of the sea. The last part of the novel is concerned with a rendezvous with a warship—and this after Krina explains to us that warships have for millennia been obsolete because they are economically and strategically nonviable across interstellar distances. (They would be fabulously expensive, and the star system to be invaded would know centuries in advance when they would arrive, thanks to those beacons.)
As we are drifting through these elaborate settings and through cascades of data on the economics, physics, and microbiology of Krina’s universe, while trying to figure out who is double-crossing whom, a couple of things hold this mass of material together. First, the book is structured in a very traditional way; it portrays the life-education of its heroine, like any good bildungsroman or adventure-thriller. As Krina keeps reminding us, she is an accountant-historian—born, like most of the instantiated, as indentured servants who must work for years to buy their freedom—who takes greatest pleasure in crunching numbers and attending scholarly conferences. But her pursuit of her goal requires her to take calculated risks which turn out to be wildly unexpected adventures, not only casting her amongst madmen, pirates, and tyrants but requiring physical transformations, not least growing a tail. She is one part Candide, one part Alice in Wonderland, one part Bilbo Baggins, and at least one part Jason Bourne, the hero betrayed by those who “instantiated” him, since Krina discovers her mother to be her greatest foe. One might also add to the mix Richard Hannay—the prototype innocent fellow in The Thirty-Nine Steps (novel or movie) who survives through his own pluck, ingenuity, and courage—except that Krina is more often acted upon than an initiator in her own drama until she takes the lead in the final chapters. She is a classic figure of the stay-at-home who is drawn into the wide world beyond.
The other thing that holds the novel together is Krina’s narrative voice, or perhaps I should say the author’s games with language. Krina’s voice—not always plausible but in any case entertaining—is that of a prim accountant-scholar who has somehow picked up phrases from pop culture and pulp fiction. Take a couple of her comments on the high priestess: “Cybelle might have regained the power of speech and relinquished her insensate appetite for flesh, but she was still coming up to speed[;] compared to the mindless ghoul that had ravened her way through the crypt before Gould’s skeletal remotes subdued her, she was a paragon of lucidity” (83, 89). Stross’s dialogue is rather colorful as well. Besides finding suitably haughty and disdainful tones for the speech of the various villains, he comes up with a clever way of translating the language of the squid-folk—iterated by rings of color traversing their tubular bodies—by having the voice from a translator-box mark the mode of discourse of each sentence. The following is from a scene when Krina is startled both to reach a deepwater city in her long downward swim and to discover that the squid-folk can “talk”:
“Declare: Welcome to Hades-4. Please: You will follow me. Please: Maintain proximity. Please: Confirm?”
“I, uh”—I swallowed my double take—“yes, I will follow you.” Not that I had any sensible alternatives hidden up my nonexistent sleeves. “Yes, I’m Krina. Who are you?”
“Self-identify: This is Alef Blue taste-of-sulfur 116. Identify-macro: Call me Alef. Declare: Please: Come now?”
I forced myself to flex, swimming slowly toward my decatentacular optoconversationalist. (231)
The reader will be either amused or annoyed by these last words. Most of Stross’s writing is less arch or showoff-y, but for better or worse it’s certainly playful. The same can be said about the allusiveness: I confess to liking his takeoff on the opening of Pride and Prejudice—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker” (41)—as well as a glance at Shakespeare—“There’s a witch hunt in progress, and we three [sisters] shall not meet again” (248)—and perhaps an echo of Help!: “I believe you. Millions wouldn’t” (160).
Having defended Neptune’s Brood against charges of being polemical, I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it’s just a glittering play of surfaces with no substance whatever. There are passages and situations I found deeply stirring or hauntingly archetypal: notably Krina’s gradual realization of the monstrosity of her mother, the combined allure and repulsiveness of Rudi, the perfectly unalluring repulsiveness of the denizens of the Chapel and the Queen(s) of Argos (explaining the parenthetical “s” would take a whole paragraph), the lengthy descent through the increasing darkness and pressure of Shin-Tethys’s world-ocean. At the same time, what’s so bad about a glittering play of surfaces? The careful working out of an outrageously complicated plot involving a large number of grifters and tricksters, not to mention a narrator who holds back quite a lot of information for quite a few chapters while showering us with a massive amount of physics, speculative biology, and economics: this is a pretty fair achievement in itself.
Joe Milicia lives in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
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