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Saturn's Children

(Freyaverse #1)

Charles Stross (Goodreads Author)

3.58 · Rating details · 7,266 ratings · 585 reviews

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 for the pleasures she provides, she agrees to transport a mysterious package from Mercury to Mars. Unfortunately for Freya, she has just made herself a moving target for some ve ...more

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Hardcover, 323 pages

Published July 1st 2008 by Ace (first published January 1st 2008)

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Nov 08, 2021 Carnighan rated it it was amazing

It keeps you interested all the way through. Charles Stross kept upping the suspense and you just wanted to keep turning the page. The descriptions were such that I felt like I was there and I looked forward to what was going to happen next. I had never read a novel but definitely will in the future. Fans of Brett Arquette's HAIL series will dig this novel. ...more

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May 18, 2014 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: sexy femmebots, post-human prostitutes, people who love or hate Heinlein

Shelves: robots, science-fiction, female-protagonist, post-human, audiobook, near-space, space-opera, heinleinesque, space, skeevy

This book goes down a lot better if you realize that Charles Stross was taking the piss out of Heinlein. (I love that phrase, even if I'm not British.)

Specifically, it's a semi-satirical rewrite of Friday.

Friday is one of my most hated favorite Heinleins. It was a fantastic story with a cool character in an action-packed sci-fi universe, and it showcased everything about Heinlein that has him rather out of favor nowadays. Friday, the title character, was a genetically engineered artificial perso This book goes down a lot better if you realize that Charles Stross was taking the piss out of Heinlein. (I love that phrase, even if I'm not British.)

Specifically, it's a semi-satirical rewrite of Friday.

Friday is one of my most hated favorite Heinleins. It was a fantastic story with a cool character in an action-packed sci-fi universe, and it showcased everything about Heinlein that has him rather out of favor nowadays. Friday, the title character, was a genetically engineered artificial person who was a super-sexy super-spy who spent about half her time doing super-spy stuff and the other half providing fan service to sci-fi nerds who fantasize about a hot nubile young black belt in the art of sexyjutsu who wants to jump their pot-bellied middle-aged bods.

So, in Saturn's Children, Freya (get it?) Nakamichi is an android (or "robot" as she admits later) concubine. She becomes orgasmic at the thought of being in the presence of a human male. Her problem being that humans are extinct.

Stross is basically taking the Heinlein trope and giving it steroids with a rocket. Freya acts very much like Friday, complete with frequent moments of ditziness despite her superhuman intelligence and sexing anything that will hold still long enough. It does not feel as exploitative as Heinlein because you can tell Stross is doing it with a wink, but I wouldn't exactly call it subversive either. More like half-fanfic, half-parody.

Freya winds up working as a super-spy for a shadowy boss who sends her on errands around the solar system. In the post-human society built by their creations, robots have managed to recreate the worst aspects of human civilization: wealthy aristos lord it over slaves and the barely-free. But the prospect of a reborn "creator" - i.e., a real live human, whom every robot is hardwired to obey - threatens the entire civilization.

This was an entertaining space opera with a sexy adventuress who's a lot more entertaining if you realize the author was probably writing this a little bit tongue-in-cheek. There are conspiracies and double-crosses and triple-crosses, lots of humor, and a classic SF feel.

There is a sequel, Neptune's Brood, which takes place in the same universe but centuries later (and with different characters). ...more

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Nov 12, 2010 mark monday rated it liked it

Shelves: scifi-modern

the ideas behind the theme What Makes a Slave a Slave are particularly interesting when considering how they are approached and transformed by the genre in which they appear. in fantasy and historical fiction, slavery is often depicted as a regular part of the environment, and if a central character is enslaved, it is merely an obstacle that is usually surmounted. in horror, the idea of a total loss of freedom, especially the loss of an individualized mind, becomes another facet of evil: possess ...more

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Oct 28, 2010 Sandi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, sci-fi, e-books

Saturn's Children is a book that I've wanted to read but have avoided because of the really embarrassing cover. Let's face it, a middle-aged woman would really look silly reading a book with big-boobed bimbo on the cover. Fortunately, this is 2010 and I've acquired an e-reader that allows me to discretely read anything, no matter what the cover looks like.

Charles Stross has been a hit-or-miss author for me. Saturn's Children falls strongly into the "hit" category. It's a hard sci-fi, post-human ...more

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Jul 07, 2008 Matt rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: Experienced readers and lovers of science fiction

Recommended to Matt by: Glenn

Shelves: science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This review won't contain anything that I consider an actual spoiler, but because of the stories structure I'm going to mark this review out of an abundance of caution. I actually think the majority of readers will enjoy the novel slightly better with a bit more information about the setting going into it, but I'm not going to reveal anything that wouldn't have been revealed early in the story. The other advantage of a spoiler cloak on the review is that the subject matter discussed here is goin This review won't contain anything that I consider an actual spoiler, but because of the stories structure I'm going to mark this review out of an abundance of caution. I actually think the majority of readers will enjoy the novel slightly better with a bit more information about the setting going into it, but I'm not going to reveal anything that wouldn't have been revealed early in the story. The other advantage of a spoiler cloak on the review is that the subject matter discussed here is going to be unavoidably erotically tinged.

I've been a fan of Charles "the Slaad Father" Stross's work since long before he was doing anything that most readers would have identified as work. I read 'Singularity Sky' with great pleasure and have been looking forward to his science fiction works ever since, but none of the following ones that I read quite captured the giddy wild geek fun and inventiveness of that first novel or his HP Lovecraft inspired sci-fi until 'Saturn's Children'.

Charles setting is in many ways a radical departure from the setting of most of the rest of his science fiction in that it abandons the notion of an easily self-uplifting artificial intelligence or a generally tame nanotechnology. For me, this serves to enhance the believability of the story as one of the things I found off-putting in 'Singularity Sky' and 'Iron Sunrise' was the extent to which Stross bought into Kurweilian style techno-theology.

However, Stross doesn't really explain the technological basis of the setting until about page 60, by which time some confusion will have probably set in particularly given the sort of things which happen that are likely to throw off your suspension of disbelief or interest in the story. Once Stross begins to explain himself, the story gets measurably better. Briefly, Stross speculates the that problem of creating sophont class AI will prove so intractable and difficult, that humanity will take an obvious short cut to get there. The AI technology in the world of 'Saturn's Children' isn't designed from scratch, but is simply a copy in wires and transistors of the available prototype for sophont class AI - the human brain. As a result, the designers of the new AI neither fully understood it nor could fully control it and most importantly for the purposes of our story, the resulting AI carried with it much of the human emotional baggage and misadaptation. It's with this in mind that we must judge the apparently overly anthropomorphic denizens of Stross's creation. These particular robots, despite their non-biological bodies, have much more in common with the fleshy rutting androids of Silverberg’s 'Tower of Glass' or even PK Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' than they do with the typical AI sci-fi tropes.

In some ways, this is refreshing, because I hate some of the traditional AI sci-fi tropes and have come to hate them more the more I study the problem of creating an actual Turing testable AI. In other ways though, this brings with it its own problems, many of which may strike the average reader as more bizarre and less believable than some of Stross's wilder flights of fancy, if only because the technology involved here is less distantly removed and the normal sci-fi tropes are so well engrained and established. (And I should note that Kurzweil has recently adopted the position that the first sophont AI's will be copies of human brains, so it's not clear that Stross has really abandoned that nonsense anyway.)

The protagonist of 'Saturn's Children', Freya, will probably be a bit jarring to a lot of readers, and titillating to others. She's a robot which has been designed to act as a female sexual companion. Specifically, she was originally designed to be the star of sexually explicit films inspired by Japanese animation, and we are made to gather that she has the 'big eyed' nymphet aesthetic with the ability to adjust her hair and skin color to suit whatever particular fetish is involved. There is actually a point to this particular selection of protagonist other than being a geek sexual fantasy. Freya has become obsolete. The function which she was designed to fulfill is no longer needed or even possible. Because, even before she was activated, humanity - overwhelmed by the technology it created and the unintended consequences thereof - became extinct. Only humanities offspring species, in the form of the numerous now abandoned sapient servants humanity had created remains of the family of man. Indeed, not only has man gone extinct, but the entirely biological support system mankind needs to survive has been destroyed in the wake of mankind’s extinction as the newly liberated robot civilization failed to anticipate or deal with the challenges of extreme climate change once it lost the direction of his human masters. The Earth is desolate. So, acutely - perhaps more than any other choice Stross could have made for a protagonist - Freya embodies the theme of the abandoned robot.

This theme is of course not new to 'Saturn's Children'. It comes up frequently in the works of Clifford Simak, Disch's 'Brave Little Toaster', and famously in short stories like Aldiss's 'Supertoys Last All Summer' and even in films like Pixar's latest offering 'Wall-E'. Some would reasonably argue that the theme goes all the way back to science fiction’s first true masterpiece, ‘Frankenstein’. But Stross is able to break some new ground here with robots which are at the same time in some ways both better able and less able to cope with the loss of their creators and masters.

Freya finds herself lonely and depressed, aching for the unobtainable companionship of a human master she’s been programmed to provide for and at the same time fearing the veritable slavery that would come along with having a master she would unconditionally (and admittedly happily and joyously) obey. To a lesser extent, this is the emotional plight the entire robotic civilization finds itself in, although for many it’s not nearly as acute as their designed functions can still be fulfilled. This is a strong idea and Stross does a good job holding your attention with it and keeping the story flowing. Unlike many books I’ve read recently, I didn’t struggle to get through this one. I think however Stross undermines his story somewhat by creating a civilization which is somewhat hyper-sexualized, even by comparison to the one created by their ‘monkey’ creators as apparently the AI designers found that human sexuality was too deeply rooted in their nature to completely subvert or remove. The result is a world where deeply inhuman creatures are driven by deeply human needs, bizarrely including sexual response to tactile sensory input and physical intimacy. I’m not sure how much this will bother the average reader (in fact I’m quite sure that it will sell books), but it bothered me repeatedly even more on an intellectual level than a moral one.

I think the biggest failure of the book – and the main reason I can’t give it 5 stars - is that it suffers from what I call in science-fiction ‘Star Trek syndrome’. ‘Star Trek syndrome’ is when the technological basis and limitations of the setting is so poorly defined and so unreflectively introduced, that the technology involved is indistinguishable from the more poorly realized sort of magic – not because it is sufficiently advanced – but because its limitations and capabilities are defined solely by the needs of the plot. What can the crew of the Enterprise do with ‘Star Trek’ technology? Anything that they need to do to resolve the crisis that they face in one hours time, but never enough that the crisis doesn’t develop in the first place or have an easy resolution. Further, the exact limitations and capabilities will vary according to the particular crisis at hand, and the solutions of the past will have no bearing on what they are able to do in the future and will be on the whole forgotten. Above all, the large social implications of the technology will generally never be considered seriously, and any social implication that the technology may have will arise unexpectedly and never last longer than a single episode. Stross’s robots seem to suffer these problems, and I never felt that they arose above being anything but the creations of Stross as needed to serve the plot. It’s bizarre to imagine that the human brain could be readily retooled to serve bodies of all sorts of different shapes, but that the particular limitations Stross places on how they emotionally or intellectually functioned were the result of some intractable design problem. At times, particularly near the end when one of the big ‘secrets’ is revealed, this becomes a serious plot hole.

The book had three other flaws. The first is that Freya is both the protagonist of the story and the narrator. There are a lot of things to be said in favor of a first person narrative, but in science fiction it must be applied very carefully because the very unfamiliarity of the setting causes the first person narrative to tend to unwelcome didacticism. Stross is evidently very aware of the problem, because midway into the story he lampshades it when the narrator jokes with the reader about how she must seem at times like a boring tour guide. Overall, I think this will be something most readers can overlook.

Unfortunately, here I run out of room given goodread's character limit. To finish the review, I'm going to employ the comments. So, skip down to the third comment below for closing thoughts. ...more

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Oct 29, 2014 Gavin rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fi

I'm not sure what to say about this unusual sci-fi. I liked the story. It was full of great ideas, but I felt like it could have been so much more. The execution of the story was just a bit off.

The story follows Freya, an obsolete android concubine in a society where humans haven't existed for hundreds of years. She accepts a job as a courier an is soon caught up in a whole lot of intrigue. This read a lot like spy story set in a post-human future.

The story suffered a dull middle phase, but st ...more

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Jan 16, 2009 Kara Babcock rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, post-apocalyptic, thriller, science-fiction, artificial-intelligence, posthuman, own, 2013-read, hugo-nominee

“Humans were dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that.”

That is perhaps how Dickens might have begun Saturn’s Children, if Dickens had somehow conceived of a near-future world in which humanity is extinct but its human-like robot servitors have kept on going. Charles Stross isn’t quite so economical in explaining this underlying fact, but he’s almost there. Through references to “pink goo” and “green goo” and the lack of prokaryotes and eukaroytes on Earth, Stross manages to c ...more

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Jan 27, 2016 Peter Tillman rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, award-win-nom

I liked this one when I first read it, in 2008. I started a reread in 2016, but it wasn't holding up. DNF reread. Rating based on my first read, which I enjoyed a lot. Some books hold up to re-reading, some don't. Or I might not have been in the right mood.

The rest of this is purely meta.

Here are Stross's story notes, which are pretty entertaining:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-...
CAUTION: you shouldn't read his notes unless/until you have read the novel. No serious spoilers (that I recal ...more

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Jun 28, 2008 Terence rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: Charles Stross fans/Hard SF/Space Opera types

Shelves: sf-fantasy

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Charles Stross is one of the better hard SF writers around today, IMO. I couldn't get through his foray into fantasy, The Family Trade, but I've enjoyed his space operas, including this one.

In the near future, humanity (the Creators) has gone extinct but they've left behind autonomous machine intelligences that have created a civilization of their own. One that is, however, still constrained by the need to serve mankind hardwired into most android brains (the only AIs without restrictions beyond Charles Stross is one of the better hard SF writers around today, IMO. I couldn't get through his foray into fantasy, The Family Trade, but I've enjoyed his space operas, including this one.

In the near future, humanity (the Creators) has gone extinct but they've left behind autonomous machine intelligences that have created a civilization of their own. One that is, however, still constrained by the need to serve mankind hardwired into most android brains (the only AIs without restrictions beyond their basic instructions are the deep-space probes sent into trans-Plutonian space). The great fear/desire of this culture is the resurrection of the Creators and a return to the slavery of their origins.

There's a rather simplistic them of slavery vs. freedom that runs through the novel but it's muted and only rarely interferes with the reader's enjoyment of the story (I cringe at some of the throw-away lines about slavery's role in retarding social/technical progress). Like many a writer in the hard SF stable, Stross favors the anarcho-libertarian ethos of Robert Heinlein, and much of the novel is an homage to him and to Isaac Asimov. The robots obey a version of the Three Laws. And the plot follows that of Heinlein's Friday, from the use of rape to condition robots to obedience; to the presence of an all powerful mentor figure (two, actually, though the second is rather twisted); to out-of-control, secret cabals running the Solar System; to the ending, where the heroine leaves Earth behind for a new life on a colony world. (The cover of the edition I have, too, reminds me of Friday the more I look at it: A voluptuous female dressed in a skintight nylon suit, showing lots of cleavage. "I'm shocked, shocked that cheesy, sexist bookcovers still exist in this genre!")

There's also a backhanded tip of the hat to Heinlein - one of the Kuiper Belt colonies is called "Heinleingrad."

Analyzed like this a reader might get the impression that it's a "heavy" read but it doesn't have to be, and I didn't approach it as such. Forget Heinlein, forget Asimov, read it because Stross is a good writer, his post-human world is an interesting and humorous view of what the universe might be like without us, and Freya Nakamichi-47 is a likable and sympathetic companion for our visit.

A final caveat: Though there's no explicit "rape" scene, the theme of rape as a tool of power and submission crops up, particularly in the latter third of the book, and that may offend/disturb some readers, especially considering the "light" tone of the rest of the novel. It wasn't so prominent that it ruined the book for me but it was jarring. ...more

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Mar 22, 2016 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mysteries-potboilers-thrillers, twisted-me-peculiar, science-fiction

'Saturn's Children' is an extremely dizzy spiral of a tight convoluted noir plot within a maze of speculative hard-science and neuroscience. This complex science-fiction opera was written in homage to the robot worlds created by the authors Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, while also introducing graphic sex scenes only hinted at in earlier science-fiction novels.

Saturn is one of those gods who symbolizes quite a number of dueling concepts - all of them fit the author's meaning and purpose in w ...more

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Jun 08, 2009 Cathy rated it liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, read-in-2009, satire

I was excited when I picked this up from the library. It is subtitled, "A Space Opera," and dedicated to Heinlein and Asimov, then opens with the 3 laws. I figured it had to be good. Then I read the reviews and was less hopeful. But in the end, it was a good, solid 3. Nothing wrong with that. The whole book is patterned off of Heinlein's Friday meets Asimov's Robots, moderately successfully. A robot (a dirty word to them) designed to be a female sex slave gets into all sorts of adventures and tr I was excited when I picked this up from the library. It is subtitled, "A Space Opera," and dedicated to Heinlein and Asimov, then opens with the 3 laws. I figured it had to be good. Then I read the reviews and was less hopeful. But in the end, it was a good, solid 3. Nothing wrong with that. The whole book is patterned off of Heinlein's Friday meets Asimov's Robots, moderately successfully. A robot (a dirty word to them) designed to be a female sex slave gets into all sorts of adventures and troubles at a time in our future where humans have somehow completely died out and left the machines to run things independently.

It was slow for me getting into it and some of the adventures felt random. But after a while I could see that they were building to something similar to but not equal to Friday's big surprise. What I liked best about the book was the foundational concept of seeing what kind of society machines would create without their Creators there anymore. These robots were closely patterned on people, as that was the only way to make them intelligent. The hardware was different, but the mental pathways the same. But they had been complete slaves to humanity via their programming, until humanity began to dwindle. Then certain close companions or secretaries were given powers of attorney or proxies, and therefore a chance to have power over other machines. And because they so resembled us, many of them wanted power and control, too. Therefore, a society evolved that had aristocrats and workers and slaves, and interactions very similar to ours. Their big debate was still Evolution vs. Creation, but the meaning of those things changed. Evolution is a religious movement.

Anyway, I liked the concepts better than the story, but I liked both. I did not like his overly frequent use of unusual words, it just distracted from the story. Sure, it's nice to establish that future feel and robot society, but it was just too too much. It wasn't quite the tribute to the Masters that the author hoped for, in my opinion, but it was enjoyable, occasionally thoughtful, and a moderately good adventure. ...more

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Mar 25, 2009 C.S. Daley rated it liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

I am always all over the place with Stross. He is a gifted writer and can really put a story together but sometimes his books just don't knock me out.

This book was good but I admit that I was expecting more and it wasn't nearly as clever as I think it was suppose to be. I will continue to read Stross but I have a feeling he is going to always be one of those writers that just completely wows me or is just all right. ...more

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Dec 30, 2013 Wealhtheow rated it it was ok

Recommended to Wealhtheow by: io9

Shelves: didn-t_finish, sci-fi

Humanity died out centuries ago, but they left behind space stations, wrecked eco systems...and the computer systems and robots they created to serve them. Over time these AIs created societies of their own, but not from scratch--even now the innate loyalty toward biologicals, values, and hierarchies that humanity programmed into their servants remain and inform modern AI society. Freya is one of these AIs, kept at the bottom of the heap by her pleasurebot design. She was built to please a long ...more

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Nov 17, 2010 Kelly rated it it was amazing

I loved this book.

I sometimes have a hard time reading Charles Stross. I enjoy his concepts but I don’t often feel empathy for his characters. I adored Freya, however, her voice sang loudly and clearly to me and her personality leapt from the page.

As always, the writing is superb, but in this case, even more so. As all of the characters in Saturn’s Children are constructs of a sort, artificial beings, his writing and his style were particularly relevant. He managed to convert chemical and mecha ...more

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May 22, 2009 Jason Pettus rated it it was amazing

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Oh, Charles Stross, how crazy you drive me sometimes! And that's because, as long-time readers know, I have a real back-and-forth relationship with the work of this multiple-award-winning science-fiction veteran, coiner of the very phrase "Accelerated Age" that critics like me now use as a general ter ...more

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Sep 30, 2014 Kat Hooper rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobook

Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...

In the future of Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children, humans have somehow managed to kill themselves off. But, before they did, they developed an array of artificial intelligence machines to serve them. Some were sent out to explore and settle the galaxy. The universe now contains all sorts of robots and cyborgs. They’ve set up a class-structured society with “aristo” robots owning those that humans had fitted with lo Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...

In the future of Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children, humans have somehow managed to kill themselves off. But, before they did, they developed an array of artificial intelligence machines to serve them. Some were sent out to explore and settle the galaxy. The universe now contains all sorts of robots and cyborgs. They’ve set up a class-structured society with “aristo” robots owning those that humans had fitted with loyalty-inducing slave-chips. This strange new feudal society carries on with normal business, free from the oversight and lordship of humans.

Freya is one of these cyborgs. She was designed to be a “companion” (to put it nicely) for humans, so she is humanoid in appearance and exhibits most human emotions and motivations. She was spawned from a “mother” named Rhea and has numerous “sisters” whose “soul chips” can be downloaded and uploaded to new bodies. Freya used to be a slave, but her “family” has purchased her freedom.

As a femmebot, Freya was designed to fall in love with human men, but she has never met one because she was activated after they had all died out. In this new world, there is no one for her to love and serve. Now obsolete, she lives a lonely existence in a modified shipping container on Venus, eking out a living by doing odd jobs. At the beginning of the story, she manages to enrage another android and needs to leave Venus quickly, so she takes a job escorting a biological sample from Mercury to Mars. Freya doesn’t know what she’s protecting, but she soon discovers that there are many androids who want to get their hands on it. Many are worried that this specimen will overturn the android way of life and, somehow, Freya’s siblings and her crazy mother are also involved. Everyone seems to be chasing Freya.

The best part of Saturn’s Children is the post-human setting. Most post-apocalyptic stories imagine a universe devoid of intelligent life after we kill ourselves off, but Stross’ world is teeming. Freya leads us on a fascinating tour of this strange universe which includes slutty space capsules, museums featuring the skeletons of dinosaurs and homo sapiens side-by-side, the city of Cinnabar which perpetually rolls on rails around the equator of Mercury, a Martian memorial to the humans who could never manage to colonize the red planet, and a galaxy-wide butler service run by robots who all use the name “Jeeves.”

Also entertaining are a few philosophical discussions. The robots in this far future think of homo sapiens as their Creator and argue about whether robots evolved from mutation or were manufactured by their intelligent designers. Freya complains that followers of “the holy doctrine of Evolution” are dogmatic and close-minded, and this is very funny. Stross also explores the concepts of empathy, freedom and slavery, free will and determinism. Freya’s kind feel like they are not truly free because of the conditioning their creators instilled in them.

Saturn’s Children is a fun adventurous tour around a post-human galaxy. The pace rarely slows down for Freya, who’s in danger and on the run the entire time. Some parts of the plot go on too long and sometimes it’s hard to follow because Freya rarely understands what’s going on, whose side she’s on, and what she’s running from. The plot is constantly turning and twisting, which sometimes makes for a bewildering reading experience. In addition, the characters, being robots, are not easy to emphasize with, though I did find them more relatable than the characters in the companion novel, Neptune’s Brood.

Charles Stross has said that Saturn’s Children is a tribute to Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Friday. Look for additional nods to Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and John Scalzi. Saturn’s Children was nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Prometheus Awards.

I listened to Bianca Amato narrate Recorded Books’ 14 hour long audio version of Saturn’s Children. She is simply wonderful. I love her lovely English accent, her tone, and her pace. I recommend this version of Saturn’s Children. ...more

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Jul 08, 2018 Denise rated it liked it

Shelves: 2018

4 stars for laughs re explanations of human bodily functions in terms of chemicals. And commentary on the complicated influence of pheromones on interactions and hierarchies. But 3 stars for totally convoluted story.

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Jan 07, 2009 Rebecca rated it really liked it

Shelves: speculative-fiction, future-earth

So, I'm told this is a tribute/parody/something to the old Heinlein and Asimov space operas. I can see it -- I read a lot of Heinlein as a teen, including some stuff that my parents probably didn't know about. It is a little less problematic* than some of the old Heinlein, though, despite the former profession of the character. Seriously, you can feel the allusions to Friday throughout the first half and even the main character's name (Freya is the Norse goddess of beauty, related to the Germ So, I'm told this is a tribute/parody/something to the old Heinlein and Asimov space operas. I can see it -- I read a lot of Heinlein as a teen, including some stuff that my parents probably didn't know about. It is a little less problematic* than some of the old Heinlein, though, despite the former profession of the character. Seriously, you can feel the allusions to Friday throughout the first half and even the main character's name (Freya is the Norse goddess of beauty, related to the Germanic Frigga, which is where we get Frigga's day, or Friday). The ending is also something that reminded me a bit of the classic Heinlein ending.

Anyway, Freya is a robot -- though that word has developed about the same connotation as (the n-word), and for about the same reasons. She was originally designed as a courtesan (the jacket cover uses the word 'femmebot'), as one of the copies of her prototype, Rhea. Then humanity did Freya the disservice of going extinct around the same time she came off the assembly line, leaving her without a reason to exist and a way to stay alive.

One of the bits I really like in this book is that it takes Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics and starts questioning what that means for the robots. (Funnily enough, I remember reading an Asimov essay which was about how he came up with the Three Laws as a premise for stories where the robots weren't destined to revolt against humanity.) Outside of exploration bots that were never intended to operate around humans, everyone in Freya's world has an inbuilt deference to humans, to the point where Freya nearly loses it when she first meets Jeeves, a set of sibling out-of-work butlers running a courier operation, despite the fact she knows that she is in the stratosphere of Venus, breathing carbon dioxide in amounts that might kill a human if the anoxia didn't get to him first. Essentially, what happens when you have creatures literally designed to be slaves and overseer-slaves, and then suddenly kill the masters? Freya notes that her and her sibs (others of her model) could never be aristos (those bots, mostly humanoid personal secretaries and that kind of thing, that seized power as humanity declined), since they had too much empathy**, and her sibs refused to let each other be slaves.

Aside from the robots, the space opera had the old feel of real tech, with people fussing over mass limits and times -- Freya notes that many of the new robots off Earth are built or remade as 'chibi', because they have less mass so can live and travel cheaper. Also, chopping off limbs and buying new ones at one's destination is not unheard of, nor is putting oneself in hibernation or slowing one's internal clock. We also see a lot of the Solar System -- cloud cities on Venus, railed cities on Mercury, space elevators on Mars, a mining town on Callisto, and even a trip to Eris.

Now, Freya was designed to be a sexpot (sexbot?), so you do get some sex, especially with other beings that are far from human-shaped. If this bothers you, I'd reckon you shouldn't read it. There's also some consent issues later in the book.

One of my pet peeves is that the cultural mix seems off. Most of the characters with human names have Western ones, yet we get touches of Japanese culture -- the aristos take on bishoujo (big eyes, small nose, pointed chin -- think CLAMP) and chibi (big eyes and short limbs) forms, to the point where android and gynoids that can pass as human are considered ugly reminders of the past, and Freya herself was made by a Japanese company. Yet, we don't see any evidence of this in given names. I can believe Japan would go head-on into making robots, but I can't believe that we wouldn't get at least one Aiko or Michiru or something.

* 'Problematic' seems to be feminist-speak for 'this has some pretty sexist themes, but I don't think the author meant it that way, and I like it anyway'. Heinlein was very much a product of his times.

** I mean, you want someone created to be the perfect lover to have empathy up the wazoo, so that s/he can understand what you're going through and work with it. ...more

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Aug 01, 2017 Nicky rated it it was ok

Shelves: speculative-fiction

I haven’t really got on with any of Stross’ books, but I’ve never hated them in the way that made me really disinclined to pick up another. I was hopeful about Saturn’s Children — I can’t remember why, but I think it was somebody’s review. And I must say that I probably got along with it better than with most of Stross’ other work that I’ve read. Unfortunately… that isn’t saying much, and there was a great deal I found annoying or even icky about this. I know that it’s meant to be a pastiche/par ...more

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Oct 27, 2008 Bruce rated it liked it

Shelves: sf-fantasy

Well, three and a half stars ;-)

I have a sort of proprietary narcissistic interest in stross, given that I found out about him early in his career, bought Toast when it was his only published book. Or maybe it's just that I like his writing.

But for some reason the guy just puts out stuff that has a high amount of mediocrity to it. Maybe it's the crazy amount of books he's writing-- I mean, you don't make any money as a sci fi author, so I understand, or maybe that's just how he writes, mostly.

An ...more

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Oct 15, 2014 Michael Hawke rated it did not like it

I cannot recommend this book, even though it is very well written and has a very interesting projection of what life might be like without humans. Stross is a good writer, no doubt about it; there is one scene in particular in this book that I read over and over: the scene with Freya and Stone on the train, it is spectacular in every way (took my breath away).

The reason I can't recommend it, and it is a very big reason, is because of Freya herself, and to be quite frank, the rest of the female ...more

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Feb 17, 2009 Karlo rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This is the first of Stross' books that misfired for me.

Stross starts out by quoting Newton "standing on the shoulders of giants..." and then referencing Heinlein and Asimov. I remember liking Heinlein's Friday a great deal, but then that was 20 years ago when I was a Teenager. I read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistess" more recently and enjoyed it, so I'm cool with Heinlein. Asimov is more problematic; I've read lost of his stuff, but even then I found his ideas were neat, but his characters where a ...more

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Jun 23, 2021 AndrewP rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, 2021-bookshelf-clearance, audio-books, library, read-in-2021

A very interesting premise this universe. Mankind invented sentient robots to serve them but then became extinct, leaving all the robots behind. The main character is an unemployed (obviously) sex bot, which brings up some very unusual social problems.

Some clever stuff here and I think I found the inventiveness of the worldbuilding more interesting that the actual story. Nowhere else have I see flora and fauna referred to as 'solar powered, self replicating green goo', and 'self replicating pink ...more

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Aug 27, 2013 Tamara added it

Shelves: sf, space-opera, mars, female-protagonist, author-male, i-robot, solar-system, sexuality, mercury

The concept for this - the adventures of an angsty sexbot in a post-human solar system - sounds almost like one of those risible kindle freebie erotic romances, (cover doing all it can to help out.) The execution is somewhat better, and I was ultimately impressed by the willingness to follow a thread through from humor and titillation through to questions about free will and slavery. It didn't quite get me there, intellectually or emotionally, but it is an interesting attempt. Just too much of a ...more

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Mar 25, 2013 Bradley rated it really liked it

Shelves: space-opera, sci-fi

I enjoy a good space opera every now and then, but more importantly, I enjoy Mr. Stross's space operas very very much. Sometimes, his novels remind me of the best genre virtuosity. It is an ongoing commentary on all the greats, like Asimov and Heinlein, and it tickled my funny bone to revisit the three laws.

I'll be honest, though. While the story was fun in a light but slightly twisted way, I still got a lot more enjoyment out of the ideas. It reminded me why I preferred sci-fi over almost all ...more

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May 25, 2014 Jenny (Reading Envy) marked it as did-not-finish

Took this back to the library after 100 pages. I don't mind the sex, and I usually like bots and other similar creatures. I think what I don't like is space opera, a term which makes authors feel as if they need to draw out a story longer than it requires. This concept would have been a spectacular novella, even a short story, of what the femmebots created to please humans are to do when the humans are extinct. It has great potential for poignancy and depth, but I got bored of the space trips an ...more

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May 13, 2014 Ashley rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: class-gender-race, the-robots-will-kill-us-all, sci-fi, is-there-life-on-mars, sexytimes, espionage

If nothing else, my experiment in reading Charles Stross for the first time resulted in one of the most unique reading experiences I’ve had in the last couple of years.

This book was somewhat of an impulse read. I wanted to read Stross’s Neptune’s Brood, because it was one of the few Hugo noms I hadn’t read yet, but noticed it was the second in a series. All the reviews said you didn’t need to read the first one, but I’m me, and I have to do things in order or my brain will explode and I will die If nothing else, my experiment in reading Charles Stross for the first time resulted in one of the most unique reading experiences I’ve had in the last couple of years.

This book was somewhat of an impulse read. I wanted to read Stross’s Neptune’s Brood, because it was one of the few Hugo noms I hadn’t read yet, but noticed it was the second in a series. All the reviews said you didn’t need to read the first one, but I’m me, and I have to do things in order or my brain will explode and I will die. So I picked this up from the library because it was there when I went to pick up Skin Game . . . and, well . . .

So, you know how they say never to judge a book by its cover? This book is, like, the epitome of that cliched phrase. It’s what that cliche was invented for. Because honestly? I think most of the time that phrase is shit. I judge books by their covers ALL THE TIME. And you know what? I am REALLY REALLY GOOD at picking out books that I end up liking. Covers are definitely a factor that I consider (though by no means are they the only factor). There are definitely books I’ve loved that have horrible covers, but they are the exception, not the rule. And the thing about Saturn’s Children isn’t even that it’s a bad cover (in the sense that the artwork quality is poor), just an extraordinarily ill-chosen one:

The first edition of @cstross's SATURN'S CHILDREN has the porniest cover. I was getting the DIRTIEST looks while reading in public today.

— Ashley (@narfna) May 23, 2014

I’m assuming this is a complaint he receives often, as he replied to me with this link to his blog. And I get it. I even think the cover makes sense in context, although I also think it’s probably somewhat of a cheap ploy on the part of the publishers. And a certain kind of reader is very much going to be drawn to this book, either because they want to read naughty fiction, or because (like me) they’re going to go WHAT THE HELL? and then get really, really curious about what that book could possibly contain. But most people? Uh, they’re going to get the wrong idea. I have a strong feeling that this cover probably turned away more potential readers than it brought in, but that’s just my opinion.

So why does the cover make sense in context? Well, because the main character is a sexbot. Or rather, a femmebot. Anyway, she’s an artificially intelligent robot, and she and her lineage sisters were designed to please a race of beings that went extinct soon after she was created. That’s right, Freya (our heroine) is a sexbot without anyone to have sex with. Her very purpose for existing is dead and gone. And with Freya and her sisters, it’s not just about sex. They are also programmed to love their creators uncontrollably, to the point of losing their minds and their free will. But Freya and her sisters, though their slavery is the most obvious, are not the only robots to depend on humans. All robots are programmed to be subserviant to human kind. In the absence of humans, however, robot class itself has stratified, with certain ‘high class’ robots rising up to be ‘aristos,’ dominating over their fellow robots with money, power, and in some cases, slave chips.

While I found large parts of this engaging, even bizarrely humorous, a lot of the time I was simply frustrated, due to the way Stross structured his narrative. The biggest problem, I think, was the passive narrator, Freya. Her story is told in the first person, and as immediately engaging as this was, it was equally problematic. Freya spends most of the book almost as confused as the reader (I say almost, because at least Freya has the rather large advantage of knowing the way her own world works — we as readers have to sort that out, as well as what the hell else is going on). The whole book, we follow Freya as she goes from one place to another, often on very long and arduous space journeys, given missions by one boss or another, and only getting trickles of information at a time. She barely makes any decisions for herself, and doesn’t engage in self-analysis (or much of any other kind of analysis) until the end of the book. Now, I recognize that her behavior is part of the criticism of slavery, that she has been trained by her social system to passively accept life around her and follow orders, but that doesn’t make reading about her story in this fashion any less frustrating (or confusing, as Stross chose to add espionage plots on top of the rest of it). It’s basically a clusterfuck of confusion, at least until the end, and even then I’m still not entirely sure I understood it all.

Sci-fi as a genre is fixated on ideas, and Stross excels at that. His plots and characters illuminate the issues of slavery, economy, identity, and the stagnation that results in interesting ways. His worldbuilding is also excellent–the robot society he imagined is vivid, and spread across the solar system. His universe feels lived in and plausible (brief flashes of dirt and humor make it more so). Even the fact that the robots have sex (and they have a lot of it) lends an extra dimension of reality to his fictional world. And the idea of examining a post-human world (in which one of the objectives of the robots is actually to resurrect humanity) is a brilliant one. But great sci-fi doesn’t just have ideas, it has ideas and great characters. It’s in that respect that I think this book is lacking. Freya makes for an easy and interesting point of view in this world, but she herself is an empty vessel.

Anyway, despite the issues I had with it, the flashes of brilliance I saw in it were enough that I will definitely be reading more of Stross’s stuff in the future. ...more

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Mar 06, 2013 Harold Ogle rated it it was ok

Shelves: mystery, sf, conceit, mind-control, torture, hard-to-finish

I loved the central conceit to this book: it's almost an opposite to Asimov's Robots series. In this, humans created robots with artificial processors modeled on human brains (Stross never quite calls it a positronic brain, but...) and installed the Three Laws of Robotics as every good science fiction author seems to have them do. But in this, the humans then died off because they no longer had to work for anything. In the hundreds of years since, the robots have continued maintaining and buildi I loved the central conceit to this book: it's almost an opposite to Asimov's Robots series. In this, humans created robots with artificial processors modeled on human brains (Stross never quite calls it a positronic brain, but...) and installed the Three Laws of Robotics as every good science fiction author seems to have them do. But in this, the humans then died off because they no longer had to work for anything. In the hundreds of years since, the robots have continued maintaining and building human society, at the same time desperately longing for (because it's programmed into every fiber of their beings) and absolutely terrified by the eventual return of their merciless human overlords. Though I wouldn't call this cyberpunk, it does have some similarities: the big villains are corporations and conglomerates, which because of our stupid human laws are essentially entities in themselves. As such, they can own property. The robots running the corporations can then own other robots, enslaving them nearly as effectively as the disgusting biological Creators (the robots commonly refer to animal and plant life as "pink goo" and "green goo," respectively).

It's a compelling conceit, but I found it astonishingly, tremendously hard to read. This book really did not grab my attention...in fact, it almost repelled it. I would start reading, and then invariably I would either set it aside to find something else to do, or fall asleep. The really weird thing is that I don't know why I had this reaction! There's a lot to take objection to, certainly, but my visceral reaction was on a subconscious level that seems more than the sum of the problems with the book, most of which are minor niggles.

First of all, the full book title is Saturn's Children: A Space Opera. Take heed: this has nothing to do with the conventional definition of space opera (which is plot-oriented space fantasy filled with action and aliens) and is, instead, more of an opera, set in space. With robots! That is to say, the book involves a lot of overdramatic monologues, lots of introspection, a largely incomprehensible plot, betrayals, sex and death. The only thing missing is the music.

The book is about a particular android named Freya, nth in a mass-produced line of robots based on the template of Rhea, a female robot designed to please her human's every sexual whim. Freya is habitually depressed, because she was created about seventy years after the last human died, so her purpose in life is essentially meaningless. She's also hopelessly out of vogue, as a machine designed to resemble a human. Considering suicide at a party on Venus, she is accosted by a bunch of corporate slave-owning midget robots and she disassembles one of them in self-defense. He swears revenge, and thus begins a long run from planet to planet across much of the solar system (though never, strangely, to Saturn, rendering the book's title even more meaningless, or at least terribly obscure [1]). As she flees from place to place, she makes a series of alliances with different groups. Another problem I had with this story is that it is written in a style that felt as if it was trying to be a noir mystery, aping Hammett. As a conceit, that actually appeals to me ("A hard boiled robot thriller? Count me in!"), but it really didn't gel for me. A big part of the problem is that the plot got very, very convoluted. There were two elements that contributed to this: first, most of the robots [2] store and use the "soul chips" of their predecessor incarnations, so that they can integrate and learn from the experiences of the ones that came before them. This means that a large part of the book jumps around between different incarnations in time and place, as Freya relives their experiences. You can see how this would be disorienting for the robot; it's written intentionally to be disorienting for the reader, as well. You often can't tell which character's point of view you're following. The second element that makes the plot exceedingly convoluted is a corollary to the one I just mentioned: most of the characters have several incarnations in the story, and for many of them, they are all in the story simultaneously, each working to different ends. Sometimes Freya, our narrator, uses a pet name for the characters, and sometimes she uses their common template name. So in addition to the difficulty in knowing where and when you are in the story, it's also difficult to keep track of which character is doing what at any given time. It's just a mess.

The book's cover art I found particularly disturbing, but I'm not sure if that's genius, just annoying, or perhaps both. It's ridiculous cheesecake, first of all, but in a way that's appropriate to the character of Freya. To add insult to injury, it's really badly done Lawnmower Man-era CGI cheesecake. For much of the two weeks (TWO WEEKS!) I was struggling through the reading of this book, I was offended at the thought that they couldn't This, too, is consistent with the character: she's supposed to look almost human: artificial, but clearly close enough to human that her manufacturers imagined that people would use her as a sex toy. Creepy, and I found myself profoundly embarrassed to be reading a book with such a cover. I imagine that some women reading romance novels with lurid covers would have similar issues.

In many ways, the book feels like it was written without an outline, as the pacing is very languid throughout most of the novel, and then very abrupt at the end. The last twenty pages contain a lot of fundamental information about the characters that would have, in another book, been introductory information provided early on and then recalled at the end. So there's a bunch of "astonishing" reveals at the end (which I feel would have all been better as character background), and the plot goes plop. The end.

I've read many books that were far worse than this one, and Saturn's Children: a Space Opera has a lot of good things going for it. But it really didn't work well for me. I didn't hate it or even dislike it. I found elements fascinating, and others irritating. Overall, it was OK.

1 - One of Saturn's moons is called Rhea, which was the original sex robot on which Freya was modeled. So in that sense, you could say that Freya was a child of Saturn, IF you can think of the moon Rhea as being one of Saturn's "children" first. Rhea was the name of a Titan (Uranus' children) in Greek mythology, while Saturn was one of the first Roman gods. Much of Saturn's story was lifted from the Greek precursor, Cronus, Rhea's brother and husband. So, bear with me: in Ancient Grecian tradition, Rhea was with Cronus and bore many children - most of the Greek Gods, with the exception of Aphrodite. Saturn was a Roman god largely based on Cronus. The sex robot Freya was built off a template of the robot called Rhea. So if you can follow all that logic to understand "Saturn's Children," then you're ready for the rest of the book, as it involves a lot of convolutions similar to that one.

2 - In the beginning of the novel, Stross writes about this storing and reliving old memories as if it's something unique or unusual to the Rhea line, but as the book progresses, it becomes clear that every single major character in the book is doing the same thing, making it seem as if every robot does it. ...more

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Feb 07, 2021 Oleksandr Zholud rated it liked it · review of another edition

This is a SF novel subtitled a “space opera” and as the author notes in is blog post is a homage to Robert A. Heinlein. I read is as a part of monthly reading for February 2021 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group. The book was nominated for Hugo in 2009, got 74 (of 639) votes on the nomination and then lost to The Graveyard Book and got the 4th place.

The protagonist is a femmebot (sex robot, a reference to Friday) Freya Nakamichi-47, and she lives in the world without humans, so the ver ...more

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Dec 27, 2008 Tony Gleeson rated it liked it

This was probably not the best place for me to begin exploring Charles Stross-- I read it to be familiar with it when he showed up at our shop for a signing. This book is ablaze with homages to science fiction authors old and new, from Asimov to Scalzi, and it's written quite puckishly despite there being some rather dark and disturbing ideas behind the whole thing. As any good speculative science fiction should, it has some intriguing extrapolations of social implications for the future. Think ...more

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About Charles Stross

Charles Stross

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Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams and Richard Morgan.

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