Reception Īs always, Stross feels like the smartest guy in the room, pushing the boundaries of identity and humanity while offering up what may be the first epic tale of futuristic macroeconomics. Her clone sister, Ana, has disappeared, and Krina is following her trail.

The novel presents itself as an extended first-person report by Krina Alizond-114, created by the 'incalculably wealthy' Sondra Alizond-1 to be a scholar of accountancy practice historiography.

Two thousand years before the main plot begins, one start-up colony, Atlantis, broke contact without warning or explanation with the rest of humanity, and two attempts to physically contact them also went dark. Slow money transactions rely on a three-way cryptoverification scheme, and so trade at one-third the speed of light. Fast money is ordinary day-to-day cash, medium money is ordinary investment instruments, suitable for use within a single planetary system, and slow money is interstellar investment instruments, understood to take centuries, even millennia, to mature. Money has been divided into three classes: 'fast', 'medium', 'slow'. Money is entirely cryptocurrency and is known as ' bitcoin', an intentional reference by Stross to the real-life cryptocurrency.

A large part of the plot turns on the question of financing such colonization. The setting of Neptune's Brood is the part of the galaxy that has since been colonized with slower than light travel. In the novel, 'humanity' is used for the 'mechanocyte'-based metahuman successor life forms, vastly improved over the original androids. In Neptune's Brood, set in AD 7000, Homo sapiens have been resurrected three times, but remain insignificant and are known as the 'Fragile'. Homo sapiens were extinct, and all the characters were androids. The setting of Saturn's Children was our solar system. The novel was shortlisted for the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Neptune's Brood is a science fiction novel by British author Charles Stross, set in the same universe as Saturn's Children, but thousands of years later and with all new characters.

Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross