Saturn's Children (A Freyaverse Novel)

by Charles Stross

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0441017312
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Ace
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.8" x 0.9" x 4.1"

Customer Reviews

Friday's child

As many others have noted, this is a Heinlein take-off. I think the master would approve. It is strongly based on Heinlein's Friday. If you doubt it, look for the hotel reservation for F. Baldwin (Freya almost says either Freya or Friday Baldwin). Baldwin was Friday's boss and of course Friday comes from Freya. Friday, as an "artificial person" was regarded as less than human. Freya, derived from a robot now considered out of date is discriminated against because of her size. (She's tall, the "new people" are short. -- Heinlein would approve of turning convention upon its surly head.) There is considerable attention to what is freedom and what it is to be chattel. The ways in which Freya or other robots can lose her freedom can be subtle or brutal (and sometimes both). I rather like the way that Stross sets it up so that the robots must perforce have many of the qualities we associate with ourselves. Humans have found that the best way to make an intelligent robot was to make it's wiring mimic that of the human brain, and to train it much the same way that a human child is trained (years of development). It makes it plausible. But it leaves them with the problem that the robots, if not subject to a coercive programming, would be disobedient and independent, much like teenagers. The robot sex is much discussed. It is interesting. Funny and ribald at times, sweet at others -- kind of like human sex. Something that is really worth imaging, is the imagery of the book. We see Venus glowing in its heat from a platform miles above the surface. We see a moving city on Mercury. Fantastic visions from the orbit of Mars and on Mars. Callisto and then Eris, deep in the Kuiper belt. Space elevators, bootstrap devices, nuclear rockets and magnetic field manipulators. (About the some of these, a good read is Gerard t'Hooft's "Playing with Planets) This is science fiction, baby!

Shakespeare and manga as well as Heinlein and Asimov

Since several other reviewers have already described the overall plot and the main themes of this book - what does it mean to be a person, what does it mean to be free vs. slave, etc. - I'm just going to concentrate on my observations of the individual elements of the book that intrigued me, rather than repeating those. So please read this review in conjunction with several others, so you get the whole picture. Charles Stross has a habit of paying specific homage to previous generations of science fiction authors in his books - for example, to Cordwainer Smith in "Glasshouse" - and in this one, he specifically mentions Heinlein and Asimov. However, there are many more references in here than just ones to Heinlein's and Asimov's books, though those are the most obvious ones. Some of them will be references only readers who have read some of the body of literature from 30 to 50 years ago will get (or even older - how many people will read the line about a character with urea and acetate and remember the old idiomatic phrase about being full of piss and vinegar?); others may be references that only younger readers will get. (For example, right at the beginning, where some of the characters are described as bishojo and chibi forms - mostly, it's going to be the younger generation that automatically knows what those are, from manga and anime; old fogeys may have to go look it up on the intertubes, which interrupts the reading experience.) And sometimes the references are more trouble than they're worth - giving two of the characters seldom-used nicknames so that one fleeting Shakespeare reference can be thrown in. Nonetheless, it's fun to try and recognize all the sources that Stross is giving credit to. Stross's characters are a mixed bag, as far as level of characterization goes. Sometimes it gets a bit confusing - which aliases are sibs of which others? Whose soul chip is in whose body now? Wait, are Domina and Granita related? In general, though, most of the avatars are identifiable enough to follow the plot. And some of the characters, even bit parts, are truly one-of-a-kind: Lindy the sex-crazed shipping pod, for example, and Bilbo the hobo, who may or may not be saner than he sounds, and Paris the hotel front desk. Stross also has a way with words that can cause one to splort soda out of one's nose on occasion, such as the beginning of one chapter: "There can be few sights more out of place in a luxury hotel than an angry bald ogress in a ripped black gown who storms in through the service entrance and demands to talk to the management..." There are many other small bits that all add up to fun - the passing Monty Python reference, the ring-tailed lemur who snores, calling someone Igor, Dr. Ecks, the parody of the Creation Museum (and the mocking of Intelligent Design/Creationism in general). There are probably a few I missed, since I haven't read nearly as great a percentage of the literature ever written as Stross obviously has. Also, spe

Robot romp

As other reviews state, it is a riff on Heinlein's "Friday". In this case, our "artificial human", Freya, is a robot femme bot, humans have gone extinct, and a fairly feudal robot society exists throughout the solar system and is heading for the stars. As with "Friday", the plot is nothing more than an artifice to allow our heroine, Freya, to show the reader what this robot society might be like and shed light on what "human" means. Stross is very imaginitive, depicting a rich society of robot culture and technology. While Heinlein wanted to make political points, Stross is more concerned with depicting how robots might feel and how they recapitulate their extinct creators. It isn't the most adult book he has written, but it is somewhat deeper that its surface suggests, and very humorous in parts. For the more serious, it reflects what might have to happen if we are to spread out beyond the earth. Fragile animal bodies will not be suitable to colonize space, but our robot offspring, bearing minds based on ours, can. I really loved this book. It is a fitting one to add to the growing Stross pantheon.

An interesting evolution in Stross' storytelling

Charlie Stross bounces between imagining a future filled with nanotech assemblers, strong artificial intelligence, and faster than light travel and describing the present and past using the established metaphors of sci-fi and fantasy. _Saturn_ describes a technologically advanced future, but compared with _Accelerando_ and _Iron_Sunrise_, this book is far more interested in exploring the human (robot?) condition. Equal parts _Rossum's_Universal_Robots_ and _Futurama_, _Saturn_ is an entertainingly quick read. There isn't much that is new here, but that isn't the point.

Late-period Heinlein Juvenile for Adults

Welcome to a future in which all the dreams of the 1950's have been realized: exploring the solar system, extraterrestrial colonies all the way out to the Oort Cloud, fast-transit spaceships, etc. etc. But they've been realized by our successors, the robots, not by living humans, who are extinct. And now our heirs squabble, in fashions just as ugly as we their Creators did. If the title of this review sounds confusing, it's because I have a lot of trouble putting this book into any fixed category. The heroine, Freya, is a sexbot (hence the late period, where Heinlein's characters actually were interested in sex). However, her situation is pure 1950's Heinlein juvenile, wherein Our Heroine is in Great Peril and must Find Out What's Really Going On. On the surface, this book is a really fun romp, as Freya's viewpoint effectively takes her on a Grand Tour of the solar system, from Venus to Mercury to Mars and outward to the Oort Cloud, seeing, meeting, fighting and sexing her way through the many variants that will be possible once the physical housing for intelligence becomes as malleable as technology and function allow. For that part alone, this story is worth the trip. But this book is by no means as simple as the above summary suggests. Just as in his last book, "Halting State", it's the hidden infrastructure that's important, and it ends up involving Asimov's unstated Fourth Law of Robotics (Any sufficiently complex intelligence will end up doing what it damn well pleases, first three laws notwithstanding.), the ethics of interpersonal relations, and the ultimate question of "Just what do you mean by a person?" I recommend this book highly. I had the great good luck to obtain an advance copy, and after I had read it once, I went back and re-read it to pick up on all the neat bits, both story and philosophy, that I missed on the first "gosh-wow" read through. I don't do that often, since my eyeballs are heavily subscribed. And I think I'm going to go back a third time. Read this at least once. You won't be disappointed.