Book Report – Saturn’s Children

Finally, I’ve finished reading Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross, YAY! My chair breaking has a little to contribute to that by forcing me away from the PC, but more on that later. First, I originally picked up Saturn’s Children because [1] I’ve always wanted to read a Charles Stross novel and [2] the sexy cover art (yes, I’m that shallow). Based on the reviews I’ve seen, Saturn’s Children is far from being his best work, but I am sufficiently impressed with it to want to find his other, better known titles.

Protagonist Freya Nakamichi-47 is a late model, high-end, fully functioning sex robot without a purpose. Humans are long extinct. The solar system (and beyond) is inhabited instead by robots, which have developed into a complex society dominated by a slave-owning aristocracy. The story begins with Freya taking a job to smuggle contraband living tissue (“pink goo”) onto Mars after offending a powerful aristo on Venus. I’m too lazy to write a proper review for the rest of the story, but if you’re interested here are links to one on sfreviews, and another on io9.

Kinky robot sex aside, most interesting is the portrayal of the slave-based society the robots inherited from their extinct human Creators. Throughout the book, Freya struggles with defining her identity vis-à-vis her fellow sister robots and the meaning of freedom – “who owns you?” Space travel is also accurately portrayed, with travel time expressed in weeks, months and years instead of near-instantaneous via some convenient but unrealistic faster-than-light technology. It definitely helps to be a robot when you are traveling in a small box atop an unshielded nuclear reactor for over a year.

Cool. And oh, Saturn’s Children is one of this year’s Hugo Award nominee for best novel.

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I glued my broken chair back together with epoxy resin – the one that requires you to mix the toxic-smelling contents of two tubes. Sticky white goo mixes with sticky black goo to make sticky grey goo that is supposed to harden to be able to hold a 3-ton load. The chair is made of plastic, so I can’t nail the pieces together, and I don’t have the budget to buy a new one.