Reddit reviews Neptune's Brood (A Freyaverse Novel)

>I imagine in the long term future, local space colonization will be a one-way, generational endeavor. Sort of like the indentured servants of the past or the student loans of the present.

There are actually a pair of books that deal with the plausible reality of space colonies in the immediate future (that is, the next thousand years or so). The presumption made is that entities would travel based on current technologies that we could at least conceive of, thus rockets, nuclear drives, and lasers. Travel between planets is, at the shortest, a months long endeavor that is nearly impossibly expensive to manage to the point that even the richest entities lop of arms and legs to reduce their delta-v cost. Going from the inner system to the outer system takes years even with the fastest propulsion methods (nuclear). Interstellar travel is an event that takes hundreds of years of work from a single star system to manage and is so monumentally expensive that the colony founded is so deep in debt that the only way to survive is to found still more colonies in the world's worst pyramid scheme.

Also, humans are extinct and robots are the ones doing all of this because, it turns out, trying to keep apes in cans alive anywhere but on earth during a very specific period of the planet's history is borderline impossible in the long term.

If you'd like to read about former sex robots learning just how shitty inter-planetary travel is, read Saturn's Children. That one will also work if you ever cared about spaceship on android, or hotel on android sexy times, too. If you'd like to learn about how stupidly expensive interstellar travel would be and the complex monetary systems necessary to keep such a system running, check out Neptune's Brood. That one is principally about accounting and FTL scams and even includes a pretty on the nose reference to Monty Python short.

This is basically the plot of Neptune's Brood btw.