January 19, 2014
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Apparently I’m not the only SF author/economist.
JDN 2456678 EDT 22:41.
Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross is an interesting book. It’s oddly compelling, but for reasons I can’t quite articulate. The world he builds is so odd and perverse—and yet as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing in it violates any known laws of nature. It is one of the hardest pieces of science fiction I have ever read, and yet it literally involves a mermaid being hunted by pirates as she searched for ancient treasure beneath the sea. (It makes sense in context… sort of.)
The reason I say I must not be the only SF author/economist is that Stross fills the book with a wide array of economic in-jokes, culminating in the fact that the ancient treasure is an abstract financial instrument that basically amounts to Bitcoin. Other examples include the fact that people can buy put options on just about anything, including other people; and the fact that people are literally born into debt. I’m honestly not sure how well people who aren’t economics-savvy would appreciate its dry sense of humor.
And people who don’t understand relativistic physics won’t appreciate it at all, which brings me to my one major problem with the book: It’s full of long sections of worldbuilding exposition that get grating after awhile and really don’t need to be there. You don’t need to give us all the details about how the nanotechnology and body modifications work. You don’t need to list the seven different types of nuclear rocket engine. The book is mostly about financial instruments (like I said, most people may not appreciate it), but even then I’m not sure we needed the level of detail we got about those financial instruments. We don’t need to know, and you probably got it wrong anyway—after all, if you knew how to make functional nanotechnology, you’d be silly to make your money writing fiction! In one of my (admittedly unfinished) novels, I simply say “nanotech bodymods”, and I figure that’s enough. What’s important is not exactly how these technologies work: It’s how they affect our lives. Great science fiction isn’t about science—it’s about the impact science has on human beings. Even robots, aliens and metahumans are really ways of commenting on the experience of humans—I write the Terlaroni not to predict some actual race of felinoids on Tau Ceti (if we found such things I’d be as shocked as anyone), but to project a different perspective on what it means to be a human on Earth.
In short, Neptune’s Brood suffers from the problem Mark Rosenfelder noted in “If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction” (which is hilarious and essential reading by the way); this is why people still don’t think of SF as “great literature”, and when a book is so great that people have no choice but to recognize it as literature, they stop calling it SF—think 1984, Brave New World, Slaughterhouse-Five. This is because great literature is about the human experience, and most SF foolishly isn’t.
