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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hilarious at turns, interesting always, 6 Sep 2008
Saturn's Children is dedicated to the memories of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Heinlein gets name-checked in the book, as does John Scalzi and Richard Dawkins.
Saturn's Children imagines a time after we humans have mysteriously gone extinct -- leaving only our intelligent, but enslaved, robots behind. Freya 47 is one such robot, a courtesan designed ultimately to pleasure her male customers; hard-wired into her brain is a lust for her One True Love. Which would be fine, except that he, along with the whole human race, stopped existing many years before Freya's creation. She and her sister sibs (Freya, and her sisters, are all based upon the template matriarch of a robot called Rhea) are left with nothing to do except explore the galaxy. Many of them will kill themselves from despair. Others are simply incredibly bored.
An aristocracy, of sorts, has developed -- the robots with enough wealth and hired thugs control those without money and thugs. Of course, even the aristos aren't really free. They don't admit the fact, but show them a live Creator and they'd be on their knees before them. Which is one reason why the aristos, amongst others, are keen to keep their Creators dead, despite the technology of the black labs, which are capable of producing "pink goo" -- flesh. But anyone with a live, and tractable, Creator could wield enormous power, and perhaps even enslave the galaxy...
Which is why it falls to a sex robot, and an organisation of butlers, to stop them, getting very confused, and often aroused, in the process...
I'm not sure why I find this book so hard to review. I liked it a lot. It was perhaps the funniest of Stross' latest books, especially at the beginning -- to the extent that I was reading out whole passages to people, leaving them in hysterics from Freya's pessimistic view of space travel and other such things. Freya is our narrator, and the story is told in first-person, so it's natural that she be the most fleshed out (un-pun not intended), but I also enjoyed the characterisation of the butler Jeeves'. With no masters to serve, their organisation has begun to dabble in politics, and it's clear that not all Jeeves' are the same -- some are cold, and cruel, and not at all worried about doing nasty back-stabbing things to any sex robots that cross their path.
There is a fair amount of sex in Saturn's Children -- Freya's frequently penetrated, in every available orifice, by no end of robot devices -- even space-ships. It's no fête champêtre for her, though, as she's also frequently left in horrible places to die or lose multiple limbs. I was never afraid that she was going to die the final death (which reminds me, unavoidably of the Doctor Who spoof: The Curse of Fatal Death). After all, it's clear from the fact that she's telling these events, that she survived them -- but despite this, the pace was, for the most part, kept fast and entertainingly so.
For the most part. The extremely large amounts of travel worked because of Freya's often funny attitudes towards it, and the fact that she could go into slowtime and arrive several years later after four or five pages. Towards the end, though, the blend of mystery spy novel and cyberpunk got a bit confusing. Especially as, this being robots, after all, some characters ended up being two or three different people at once -- same names, different people (except in some cases where multiple personalities were developed...), with different agendas. In a normal cloak and dagger tale, it would be very obvious that the nasty janitor with the distinctive pox would be to blame. In Saturn's Children, it could, and probably is, anyone and everyone, and I found myself overwhelmed a bit towards the end.
Nevertheless, Charles Stross has created a good story in Saturn's Children. The muddled and confusing parts were more than balanced out by the extremely funny bits, and for once, instead of the cold, heartless efficiency of our robot overlords, I found myself caring for a robot who was more human than her dead Creators.
[I should point out here, as I didn't in my original review for the webjournal, The Book Swede, that I think Stross is something of an acquired taste; you'd be best to start on one of the "Laundry" books!]
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
When Robots Run Themselves, 18 May 2009
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)
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Freya/Friday rules!, 1 Aug 2008
Charles Stross has gone on record as saying that this novel is not a homage to Heinlein but a continuation of his vision, the novel that Robert Anson Heinlein would have written if he was still with us. Having re-read Friday (the most obviously similar Heinlein novel)I say that Charlie has fulfilled that brief and much, much more. This book is a real rollercoaster, with action and plot twists that would daunt a James Bond, and enough solid science as a background to make the Creator-less universe hang plausibly together. For those that know Charles Stross' other work, such as Accelerando, the Laundry series, Halting State, Glasshouse etc, this book is yet another brilliantly new and engrossing read from a writer who delivers fresh, funny, frantic fiction seemingly on demand. Buy this book - you shouldn't be disappointed!
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