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Neptune's Review
Dec. 30th, 2013 03:40 pmHi,
Well, I'm plowing through the The Autobiography of Mark Twain Vol. 2 but there's no chance I'll finish it before the ball drops. I'm reading sections of it aloud to other people in the room so you can guess it's a pretty good read.
In any event, that makes Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross the last book of 2013 I've read. Neptune's Brood is a post-human sci-fi book that mostly deals with the economics of slower-than-light travel. Krina Alizond-114 is the offshoot of, and employee of Sondra Alizond, one of the wealthiest people (well...robots) in known space. Krina is supposed to meet up with her sister Ana in the Dojima system, but after being transmitted to the in-system beacon and downloaded to a new body, she discovers that Ana has gone to the water world of Shin-Tehtys and disappeared.
Krina finds transport with a flying cathedral to reach Shin-Tethys, but along the way she's waylaid by privateers/insurance adjusters. Things only become more complex from there.
The central showpiece of this book is a lengthy discussion about the way that interstellar finance happens when data can only move at light speed and physical things can only move at a fraction of that (at huge expense). The book's solution is to divide money up into "Fast" Dollars (i.e. the kind of money you're carrying right now), "Medium Dollars" (long-term assets like your house) and "Slow Dollars" (i.e. money shuttled about at light speed over interstellar distances). New colonies built up a huge debt in Slow Dollars that they borrow to fund their construction and development. Eventually, those colonies work off their debt, by establishing daughter colonies that have to borrow Slow Dollars from their parent. Dollar transactions use this complex, three-way verification system involving communications between star systems.
All of this makes the story go and it is an interesting story and with lots of fun ideas in it, but that central conceit just doesn't hold up to any serious prodding. The book refers to people having Slow Dollars and that they are able to convert those Slow Dollars into Fast Dollars (which leaves them fabulously wealthy in local terms even after unfriendly exchange rates take their toll). The problem is that given the timescale required to conduct transactions, you'd never entrust the currency to an individual. Even long-lived robotic individuals are likely to suffer mishap and, in fact, that drives part of the book's plot. It would make more sense for Slow Dollars to be entrusted only to governmental or commercial institutions but there would still be some risk of one of the parties in the transaction being unable to execute their end of the deal.
The book also suffers from Mr. Stross shoehorning a few contemporary references into the book which are more jarring than amusing and an ending that's does just enough to tie up the loose ends and then quits. A bit of an epilogue might have been nice.
Which sounds like I'm really down on this book, but although I didn't buy his financial inventions, the rest of the book was fun and I appreciate any effort to make grand sci-fi something non-military, so well worth it for that.
later
Tom
Well, I'm plowing through the The Autobiography of Mark Twain Vol. 2 but there's no chance I'll finish it before the ball drops. I'm reading sections of it aloud to other people in the room so you can guess it's a pretty good read.
In any event, that makes Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross the last book of 2013 I've read. Neptune's Brood is a post-human sci-fi book that mostly deals with the economics of slower-than-light travel. Krina Alizond-114 is the offshoot of, and employee of Sondra Alizond, one of the wealthiest people (well...robots) in known space. Krina is supposed to meet up with her sister Ana in the Dojima system, but after being transmitted to the in-system beacon and downloaded to a new body, she discovers that Ana has gone to the water world of Shin-Tehtys and disappeared.
Krina finds transport with a flying cathedral to reach Shin-Tethys, but along the way she's waylaid by privateers/insurance adjusters. Things only become more complex from there.
The central showpiece of this book is a lengthy discussion about the way that interstellar finance happens when data can only move at light speed and physical things can only move at a fraction of that (at huge expense). The book's solution is to divide money up into "Fast" Dollars (i.e. the kind of money you're carrying right now), "Medium Dollars" (long-term assets like your house) and "Slow Dollars" (i.e. money shuttled about at light speed over interstellar distances). New colonies built up a huge debt in Slow Dollars that they borrow to fund their construction and development. Eventually, those colonies work off their debt, by establishing daughter colonies that have to borrow Slow Dollars from their parent. Dollar transactions use this complex, three-way verification system involving communications between star systems.
All of this makes the story go and it is an interesting story and with lots of fun ideas in it, but that central conceit just doesn't hold up to any serious prodding. The book refers to people having Slow Dollars and that they are able to convert those Slow Dollars into Fast Dollars (which leaves them fabulously wealthy in local terms even after unfriendly exchange rates take their toll). The problem is that given the timescale required to conduct transactions, you'd never entrust the currency to an individual. Even long-lived robotic individuals are likely to suffer mishap and, in fact, that drives part of the book's plot. It would make more sense for Slow Dollars to be entrusted only to governmental or commercial institutions but there would still be some risk of one of the parties in the transaction being unable to execute their end of the deal.
The book also suffers from Mr. Stross shoehorning a few contemporary references into the book which are more jarring than amusing and an ending that's does just enough to tie up the loose ends and then quits. A bit of an epilogue might have been nice.
Which sounds like I'm really down on this book, but although I didn't buy his financial inventions, the rest of the book was fun and I appreciate any effort to make grand sci-fi something non-military, so well worth it for that.
later
Tom
