Review: Neptune's Brood

Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book has a fascinating setting, and some interesting characters with witty dialogue. And it has an interesting plot. Slam dunk for a 5-star rating, right? The problem is that the plot and the characters have almost nothing to do with each other.

Our hero wanders around having adventures in a cool and interesting world where normal humans - Fragiles - have been almost entirely replaced by robots. In amongst the adventures, she occasionally flashes back to the results of some historical research she did before the book began, about events from 2000 years ago. Almost all of the plot is in those millenia-old events. This plot strays into somewhat-philosophical ponderings about the nature of economics in an interstellar culture but I at least found it really interesting. It just has little-to-nothing to do with any of the characters we're reading about. So I very much enjoyed both halves of this book, I just wish they'd been joined together a bit better.

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