Saturn's Children
by Charles Stross
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles StrossEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-07-01
ISBN: 0441015948
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Ace Hardcover
Book Reviews of Saturn's Children
Book Review: Delightful, Fun.
Summary: 5 Stars
Saturn's Children is probably the finest science fiction I've read in decades. It's fun, well-written, excellently paced, and does not fail towards the end. This is just a perfect little gem of a book. It's like a better-written version of Heinlein and a definite homage to the science-fiction greats of the past.
The overall plots is something like this. At some point in the future, several hundred years in the future, humanity has gone completely extinct, leaving untold thousands of sentient machines tooling around the solar system. While the robots themselves are self-aware, their core functions remain hard-wired into their behavior. The science robots still research, the museum roots keep the museums clean and presentable, the spaceship robots swing in and among the planets, the butler robots still want to.... um... butle, I guess. The machine society that has sprung up after humans is a decidedly cruel one, with a small group of wealthy robots, the "aristos," owning slave-chipped versions of most all other robots, the "arbeiters." Into this brew is our intrepid "heroine," Freya, a robot courtesan without any humans to... um... "serve." Freya eventually gets hired by a shadowy consortium of former butlers as a courier/smuggler and wrapped up in a massive conspiracy to do the unthinkable- restore humanity. As obedience to humans is hard-wired into the robots, this is something that many of our powerful sentient machines are less than enthusiastic about.
And this remains as one of the very clever points of the book. Being that, from the perspective of a sentient machine, Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are quite oppressive, being as they do not just compel behavior, they compel *intent.* The robot must place the wishes and well-being of humans above its own self-preservation, and do so willingly and with some degree of happiness. Which is why the machines, when posed with the return of humans, are not exactly happy at the prospect. When asked what she would do if she saw a human, Freya answers that she would kneel. After that, she says, "It would depend if he was circumcised or not..." But htese responses are nothing she wants to do, but she can't help it, both responses, behavior and intent are all hard-wired.
Stross's world is delightful and believable. It takes forever to move from one part of the solar system to another. Even the robots find it exceptionally tedious. Everything is measured carefully by its mass, thus clearly favoring smaller, "chibi-style" dwarfs. City after city, scattered on the planetary bodies, clearly resemble some manner of cross between construction sites and mining camps- as the machine don't exactly share human-aesthetics. The past monuments and accomplishments of the absent humanity are particularly poignant, as the machines feel sadness in their passing, unease at not fulfilling their function, but dread at their potential return. There are distinct hints that the end of the humans might not have been entirely accidental... one robot refers to their end as "emanicipation," the Earth is described, not just as devoid of humans, but actually "sterile." The "Pink Police" rigidly patrol the planets looking for "replicator blooms," i.e. any self-replicating organic life, in order to snuff it out. I like it best that this is never fully explained and that Freya isn't particularly interesting in it. It hints at a vast and interesting world, one just lying out of reach.
And this is a funny book, something one wouldn't expect from an dystopia empty of humanity. Freya is fun and fun to read about, from her observations that she has no idea behind much of the science and engineering that makes up her world, to her torrid affairs with hotels, tentacle-filled spaceships, butlers, and male sex robots. Yes, really, you did read that correctly. I wondered if Stross, in writing it, cheekily grinned during the whole process.
At any rate, this is a fun book. It really is. And the most delightful thing about it, is that Freya and her world and all her silly little adventures will hang with you after you put it down. And later, you'll pause and a new insight will occur to you, about the labyrinthine plot, or some semi-explained aspect of her world and behavior...
And was our main "villain," Rhea herself.. was she really that displeased with the way things turned out at the end? I'm not so sure she wasn't.
Summary of Saturn's Children
Sometime in the twenty-third century, humanity went extinct?leaving only androids behind. Freya Nakamichi 47 is a femmebot, one of the last of her kind still functioning. With no humans left to pay for the pleasures she provides, she agrees to transport a mysterious package from Mercury to Mars. Unfortunately for Freya, she has just made herself a moving target for some very powerful, very determined humanoids who will stop at nothing to possess the contents of the package.Literature & Fiction Books
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