Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton

 

One of the major plot elements involves interstellar commerce.  It provides a "solution" to the issue of how transporting goods by starship could be financially viable.  In this story, companies have found it simply does not work in the normal manner - that is, if you pay for the merchandise.  So as companies that started colony planets go into financial crisis, another company, ZB, buys at least controlling interest in the company.  The colony company then authorizes ZB to send it's starships to the planet and take as much goods as they can - without payment.  Although this may not be financially viable in the real world either, it does give us an opportunity to look at corporate behavior, decision-making and rationalization; as well as potential consequences of the practices.

 

(Some of the portrait of business is rather clever.  There's the use of euphemisms: for instance, a company sending heavily armed starships to seize vast amounts of resources from planets is "asset realization".  Perhaps the author works on Madison Avenue.) 

 

Another important element of the story is a super program "Prime" that is used to access and subvert secure computer systems.  This should appeal to cyberpunk fans.  There is also extensive use of AI's (referred to as AS) and a cyborg-ish outer-body ("skin") the starship soldiers wear over their own bodies.

 

Most of the action in the book centers around the conflict between the ZB "asset realization" invasion and a resistance movement on the planet Fallspring that was organized in advance to oppose ZB.  In this we see both military action, and espionage, sabotage and trickery.  The resistance movement uses the Prime program extensively, as well as more traditional partisan underground tactics.

 

At the end of the book, the plot veers off from the conflict over "asset realization".  At least in one sense, the transition to this final part of the book is smooth, in another sense it's like finishing one story and starting another short story set in the same "universe" developed by the author.  And at the very end, there is one piece of pretzel logic that, at least for a picky person such as me, left the book on a bad note.  Keep in mind, though, this is a 600-page book and this last section is only a small fraction of that length.

 

An Afterword On Other Aspects:

 

To my taste, the book is stretched out too much by adding unnecessary quantities of flashback material.  A teenage romance played a role in bringing the central character to where he is at the time of the main story.  However, the length to which this is described is far beyond what readers need to understand the dynamics.  Other flashbacks seem to have lesser relevance to the main story, but are still lengthy.  The purpose of such extra bulk seems to be to increase the price of a book being sold by the pound or to attract readers who can't appreciate an SF novel that doesn't have a teenage sex scene in it.  I don't mind in principle books as long as this or books with teenage relationships, but I'd rather not have the teenage sections just to make the book longer and cost more.

 

One could list a number of implausible elements in the story.  Personally, I found these handled well enough they did not distract from the story too much.