I read Neptune's Brood and was hooked. It's a fun surreal sci-fi adventure/romp with a heck of a lot of really interesting, geeky tech interludes. Who knew a novel about futuristic accountancy and forex could be so intriguing?
> That’s all about to change, however. I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.
> It’s also a fantastic novel.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-i...
> This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are derived.