Space mermaids, space pirates, and space life insurance underwriters . . . also sexy space banking!

This book is drunk.

But like, bear with me and stuff, k? Because there are different types of drunk, and analogously speaking, this is one of the better ones. I’m not talking about one of those slurry, messy drunks, where you couldn’t find your own ass if somebody paid you to. And I’m not talking about mean drunks or black-out drunks or any of those other kinds of drunks that basically make you temporarily worthless as a human being. This is the kind of drunk where you’re only drunk enough to say and do things you maybe otherwise wouldn’t say or do, and it’s the kind of drunk that ignites that little spark of creativity in your altered mind–maybe you end up naked on your front lawn draped artfully in toilet paper, or write an epic love poem in heroic couplets to that hot person you’ve been ogling for weeks and leave it drunkenly on their voicemail, or, maybe you decide to write a book about humanoid robots colonizing the galaxy 5,000 years in the future, and the main character is a banking historian, and won’t it be fun to give the reader lessons in economics and future space history but then also turn her into a mermaid?! And there are tiny little communists that live at the bottom of this ocean planet, but that’s not really important, moving on.

I may have switched over to Charles Stross being drunk instead of the book in the middle of that convoluted metaphor, but hopefully you get my drift anyway (and besides, who knows, maybe Stross WAS drunk; maybe he’s drunk RIGHT NOW).

Anyway, the book is drunk, also. It’s just like fuck you, I do what I want, and then it launches into a lecture about how money works in the future and about how debt is the way the universe works and blah blah space cons, and it is weirdly fascinating.

Also, I burst out laughing when the main character, Krina, says that she’s fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters, and how horrible that is, because true facts: life insurance underwriters are the worst. I know this from personal experience.

Okay, now I feel drunk.

So to sum up, this book is awesome but weird and people who don’t like weird things probably won’t like it, and people who do might like it a lot. I liked it a lot. It felt much more cohesive than Saturn’s Children (which takes place thousands of years before this one, so you don’t really need to read it, although it helps with context; I definitely spent way less time being confused in this one because I’d read the first one). Neptune’s Brood is not my favorite book ever, but I loved going on all those weird tangent trips with the narrator and I love mermaids also, and this review probably isn’t very helpful, but it’s what I’ve got, so I guess you can suck it and stuff.