Customer Reviews

Saturn's Children

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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, speaking of literature, I note that as with most of Stross, this book has had excellent editing, and is almost entirely free of the spelling confusions and grammatical errors that plague most genre and popular fiction these days.

Family reading alert: even though, as many people have pointed out, the plot for this book is largely based on Heinlein's juveniles, this is most definitely not a kid's book or even young-adult; there's far more sex in it than even in Heinlein's later adult novels, and some of it is very kinky sex. Probably not for anyone too young to buy the book with their own charge card.

Summary: although there are flaws - moments where it's hard to tell the characters apart (which was also a flaw in later Heinlein), a few points where the character's actions were a bit of a non-sequiter - this is nonetheless a move-right-along, action-packed space opera, with a great deal of humor and wit.

I thought this was going to be a wonderful book when I started it. Stross has quite an imagination for worlds unlike ours. He has created a world where humans are extinct and robots have colonized the galaxy because they don't have human biological restrictions. He has some really interesting ideas such interplanetary travel that starts with a giant ferris wheel that takes your pod into orbit where you're attached to something kind of like a ski lift that takes you to the next planet. He also has an interesting idea for a movable city that travels on railroad tracks across the face of Mercury to avoid the extreme hot and cold weather of each day as the planet turns.

I should have stopped reading after Mercury.

The main idea behind the story is that robots can experience the memories of their dead siblings by inserting their dead siblings' "soul chips" into themselves. Thus, your siblings' education, training, and memories can become your own. Unfortunately, this makes for confusing reading. The main character, Freya, switches between at least 6 identities. And other robots around her are switching identities, too -- even taking on some of Freya's alternate identities. I had no idea who was who and who was doing what to whom half the time. And then there was also the problem of not knowing if the character was dreaming, remembering, or living an experience of her own or of someone else.

You get to the end of the book and it's just more of a relief than an answer to any questions. I really wanted to like this book based on the strong beginning, but it just got more convoluted and confusing the further along it went. If I weren't stuck in a waiting room with this book, I don't think I could have finished it.

Stross is back only this time the future is one without people. This is only a technicality however. Humanity disappeared for the usual vague reasons (loss of vigor, environmental destruction, blah blah) but the surviving android/robots picked up where humans left off and since they were built in the image of the Creators, civilization has not really changed. Some androids are rulers - think Dominatrix Natash - and others are slaves, money is still a driving concern, there's lots and lots of sex, crummy space travel and enough political intrigue to put the current campaign for President to shame.

HALTING STATE inquired about the nature of reality, Virtual reality vs. "real" reality and what happens when simultaneous realities mix. Virtual reality pops up again in GLASS HOUSE. The Singularity of ACCELERANDO, a cult favorite, is nowhere to be seen here. Instead we have a rather crude and at times childish romp through the Solar System with a female android who becomes, at one time or another, Freya, Rhea, Juliette, Maria and Kate among others. One problem for the reader is the sometimes daunting task of trying to figuire out which one she is. But the muddled personalities and plot is topped with the intriguing ideas presented. Souls on chips, soul graveyard, the similarities of android societies, the attitudes toward the Creators, sex between machines, slow time - all very exicting yet one gets the idea Stross is simply having fun. He's not really serious about it all.

But even with imaginative inventions, witty and sometimes hilarious dialogue and action galore, nothing can rescue this runaway plot. If Freya, the protagonist, cannot figure out who she is, what's happening, what she's supposed to do and why, how in the world is the reader expected to do so? The fact that Stross had to patiently and repeatedly explain the myriad layers and strings of the "plot" (still unclear at the last) in all its wacky meanderings says volumes.

Stross is a gifted writer - one of the best of this generation. His work is cutting edge, not quite cyber punk, not total space opera, not Asimov or Heinlein or Bradbury. Instead he offers a unique perspective on the current state of sci-fi thought. In SATURN'S CHILDREN (the title is one of the worst) Stross has reverted to older times updated by interesting ideas. My grade: B

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.

Charlie Stross is a Scottish writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy, with an emphasis on hard science fiction and space opera. His heroes are Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke.

"[Clarke] was the last of them to die. But even if he had not written any science fiction he would have left his mark on the world as the creator of the communications satellite. He did the maths to demonstrate how it would work. He was scientifically rigorous, but also highly readable." [Interview in "The Independent", March 22, 2008.]

Saturn's Children is a modern take on later Heinlein, a gloss of Clarke and a bow to Asimov and Roger MacBride Allen's Fourth Law of Robotics.

Most of all the book is readable:

"I do not contemplate suicide lightly.

"I am old and cynical and have a flaw in my character, which is this: I am uneager to die. I have this flaw in common with my surviving sibs, of course. It is a sacred trust among our sisterhood, inherited from Rhea, our template-matriarch: Live through all your deaths she resolved with iron determination, and I honor her memory. Whenever one of us dies, we retrieve her soul chip and mail it around our shrinking circle of grief. Reliving endings is painful but necessary: Dying regularly by proxy keeps you on your toes - and is a good way to learn to recognize when someone is trying to kill you.

[A much longer extract from the novel appears at orbitbooks.net .)

The other reviewers have described the plot of this interesting novel very well. For me, good as the plot was, the character development and introspection was even better. You can find a long extract on the publisher's website orbitbooks and judge for yourself.

The sci fi trinity would have been proud of Charlie, I think.

Robert C. Ross 2008

Within the last couple of centuries, humanity has gone extinct, leaving behind a galactic civilization run by androids. Freya Nakamichi-47 is one of the last remaining sexual courtesans still functioning. Instantiated from her template-matriarch, Rhea, she is programmed to selflessly pleasure humans sexually (and I mean this in the total-loss-of-all-self sense). Since humanity, which Freya refers to as her Dead Love, no longer exists, she's purposeless. This leads her to question herself and existence: what is she if she cannot fulfill her stated purpose? Is she defined by teleology or by something else? Is she defined by her origins, since her concept of self arose out of a template? What makes her Freya and not Rhea?

Stross is being mischievously clever in creating a character whose self-delineation is confused by their cloned origins as well as their understood, but unachievable, purpose. He further ratchets this confusion up with the introduction of soul chips. Freya, who wears her own soul chip that's responsible for recording her memories, actions and thoughts, has the ability to access the soul chips of all of her sibs, each one an instantiation of Rhea. By accessing the soul chips of her sibs, she can experience their experiences, and dream their dreams. Of course, the downside is that her sense of self can get even more fragmented (to the point of schizophrenia).

As the novel begins, Freya finds herself in trouble with an aristo she encounters on Venus. Aristos (the rich and powerful members of society) are slave-holders who totally control their arbeiters through implanted slave chips. Running from the aristo's hired assassins, Freya flees Venus with the help of Ichiban. In order to secure her escape though, she consents to work for Ichiban's sponsor, the Jeeves Corporation. Freya's job is to smuggle a mysterious organism from Mercury to Mars, while avoiding the Pink Police. Soon, she discovers that she has become a pawn in a much greater game, a game that could up with her enslaved or killed. With the help of a soul chip from one of her sibs, Freya must uncover the mystery of who she really is.

Stross has imagined an intellectually rich and scientific setting filled with intriguing androids, most which are non-humanoid in design, and populated with some interesting societal insights like the static nature of a slave society. The lack of moral questioning by Freya about some issues like soul chips and their moral implications is intriguing. There is no objection on ethical grounds to tapping into another sib's memory. Moral issues are abstractions which the androids don't consider, or are not programmed to consider. It makes morality seem deliciously human. This sharing of personal experiences through soul chips amounts to a group share that makes the delineation of self even more troublesome, and more interesting. (Is self sustainable through shared experiences?) All this adds up to an alienness that is refreshingly original, as well as being an astute social satire.

The underlying story unfolds like a mystery. It's told to the reader through Freya's recollection of events. Her tone at times is conversational, charming, confused, or schizophrenic, and is entirely consistent and appropriate for her situation. Stross displays a deft touch in keeping Freya on point, never letting her search for self deviate into abstractions. He successfully raises points without belaboring the issues, all the while keeping the story unfolding smoothly. The smooth pacing makes "Saturn's Children" ultimately seem more accessible to mainstream readers. While there is a rich scientific environment, it isn't so overwhelming as to be incomprehensible to those without a doctorate in the sciences.

Last Word:

Charles Stross has created a space opera which unapologetically asks big questions that scream to be pondered. "Saturn's Children" is a new entry in the long line of science fiction stories that examine the concept of identity and self, and whether technology strips the aspects of self away. Will science in its unraveling of nature take the mystery out of us? It's a pertinent question that receives a well-balanced, clever and entertaining treatment here.

Stross is one of the newer hard-sf voices, and his previous books have shown a great inventiveness and a plethora of ideas and concepts that go well beyond what we've seen in the field before. This book, while firmly grounded in homage to some of the great early SF masters of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke, is in many ways just as inventive as his earlier books.

The situation is a solar system populated entirely by robots; their creators, us poor humans, having given up the ghost a couple of centuries ago (exact means of our demise never explicitly stated), but in any case, humans have left the building. This situation alone is reminiscent of Simak's City, where the humans left en-masse for Jupiter, and left stewardship of Earth in the hands of robots. But unlike that story, here we have a vibrant society of robots, who only nominally follow Asimov's Three Laws, robots that have evolved various classes and a hierarchy based on power and money, complete with a method of completely enslaving a robot who has run out of funds.

The story follows Freya, a sexbot built to service the sexual needs of the now long-gone humans, and as such can find no purpose to her life. She has to make do with sex with other robots, which is simply not as satisfying. But the plot very quickly becomes very complicated, as Freya is hired to transport a certain illicit package to Mars (shades of Heinlein's Friday), and in doing so becomes involved in schemes and counter-schemes by those who are attempting to really control the entire solar system. During the course of delving into these schemes, we are treated to a grand tour of the Solar system, from Mercury all the way out to the Oort cloud, all thoroughly grounded in the best information currently available about conditions of each of Sol's family members.

In many ways, this book's message is about identity and just what makes a `person', as one of the capabilities these robots have is to record and exchange `soul-chips' with other robots of the same lineage. While this message is clear, it also leads to the major problem with this book. In its later stages it becomes very difficult to keep track of just who is who (schizophrenia runs rampant!), who the bad and good guys really are, and just what the ultimate purpose of each of the factions really is. Freya's character, which had been so carefully and well built up in the first half of this book, seems to get lost in all the multiple other personalities. Alongside of this is one other problem: the portrayed level of sexual attraction Freya feels for another robot who is extremely close to the model of their Creators (i.e., a human male), as I found it rather unbelievable that robots would be designed with such an overriding complex that it would subsume their normal rationality.

The ending was also a bit of a disappointment, with a bit too much of `all ends well' and `things will get better from now on', and too little resolution of some of the more complicated details of the various plot threads.

There's a fair amount of sex in this book, almost a given due to its premise, and while never extremely graphic, does include certain varieties that some might consider `kinky', and certainly makes this book unsuitable for younger people.

Inventive and scientifically solid, but eventually too complicated to really satisfy.

---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

Humanity is extinct, which is bad news for a sex-bot.

The author must have gone though a 'japan-o-phile' phase as he wrote the first 80 pages or so because they are so full of anime and japanese references to physical description that I spent much more time than I cared to looking up words. It was distracting and made the read feel cheap.

It was also extremely confusing because the main character has more than 60 perfectly identical 'sisters', all of which can exchange 'soul-chips' and mentally become a sister-bot. The author does this repeatedly though out the novel and it does nothing to help the story's clarity especially since when Freya, the heroine, becomes a sister-bot she goes by the sister-bots name. This is further complicated because the heroine sometimes has her own chip and two different sister-bot chips inside her, so she will go by all 3 names and all 3 sister-bots are active characters so you dont know if the author is referring to actions from Freya or one of her sister-bots. And the reader is further confounded by this naming circus because the book spends much of its time in flashbacks of sister-bot's lives without telling you it is a flashback or a sister bot. You're just supposed to figure it out.

I cant believe how many good reviews there are for this book, I found it tiresome and repetitive.

This book is a nice way to pass an afternoon. It's not deep literature, though it does raise the question of the future of space travel, since it points out just how fragile human beings are and how inhospitable space really is. But mostly you read Saturn's Children and you find yourself enjoying the ride as the lovely android Freya tries to unravel the mystery of her own origins and why other androids are trying to do her in as she travels through the solar system. The plot moves along in lively fashion, and it doesn't hurt that Freya is a sexbot, so there's an undertone of naughtiness to the whole thing.

I was reminded of Robert Heinlein's Friday as I read, but I think Saturn's Children is a better book; Heinlein never really wrote female characters very well (they basically are just men with boobies), but Stross does. And you just know that the second we can build sexbots like Freya, we will...

Because that's the way we're wired, aren't we?