Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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66 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Late-period Heinlein Juvenile for Adults, July 1, 2008
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.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hard Sci Fi for this century, July 6, 2008
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
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shakespeare and manga as well as Heinlein and Asimov, August 25, 2008
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.
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