Neptune's Brood - Book Review
Neptune's Brood - by Charles Stross - is an interesting SF view through a future where humanity (kind of) has expanded to many stars - but never figured out how to travel faster than light.
Thus, they can only travel on very slow colony ships - that max out at 1% light speed - or digitize themselves and upload between star systems. The latter is helped by the fact that humans have evolved beyond our current bodies (now named Fragiles) and now are based on a very interesting structure based on mechanical cells.
These allow for upgrades (vacuum resistence, wings, pressure resistent, different forms, etc), and you can actually backup your brain state on what is called a soul chip.
There are also a few drawbacks, like being attacked with a debugger or an hilarious but short zombie situation.
One of the interesting things in the future is that the very rich can just "fork" themselves into new people, adding features to further their interests. They can either transfer themselves, copy (this seems to not be done much because you can't re-absorb properly later - a pity, as some very nice other novels made great use of this), or keep these new versions working for them until they repay the cost of instantiation (a form of slavery).
One of these - Krina Alizond-114 - is the main character, a banker, and together with her sisters is searching for what is effectively buried treasure - although well beyond the range of what would be regularly possible. And now she came to the star system to find her sister, Anna.
Thus, they can only travel on very slow colony ships - that max out at 1% light speed - or digitize themselves and upload between star systems. The latter is helped by the fact that humans have evolved beyond our current bodies (now named Fragiles) and now are based on a very interesting structure based on mechanical cells.
These allow for upgrades (vacuum resistence, wings, pressure resistent, different forms, etc), and you can actually backup your brain state on what is called a soul chip.
There are also a few drawbacks, like being attacked with a debugger or an hilarious but short zombie situation.
One of the interesting things in the future is that the very rich can just "fork" themselves into new people, adding features to further their interests. They can either transfer themselves, copy (this seems to not be done much because you can't re-absorb properly later - a pity, as some very nice other novels made great use of this), or keep these new versions working for them until they repay the cost of instantiation (a form of slavery).
One of these - Krina Alizond-114 - is the main character, a banker, and together with her sisters is searching for what is effectively buried treasure - although well beyond the range of what would be regularly possible. And now she came to the star system to find her sister, Anna.
The technology on the book is very nice, and well off the beaten path, but the constants explanations do seem to drag the story a bit in the middle. There are plenty of comical bits and situations in the middle of the mistery.
Everything ends well and the finale is quite satisfying. Definitely recommended for fans of Stross and those who like their SF to be cleverer than simple space opera.
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