Product Description
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 very powerful, very determined humanoids who will stop at nothing to possess the contents of the package.
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 Saturn's Children ( dnash1124 )
As a devoted reader of Charles Stross' work, I eagerly bought this latest novel, ignoring the negative reviews as misguided. Boy, was I wrong. This book is a disjointed, stream of consciousness, rough draft at best. No amount of flashback or use of multiple "robot" personality techniques can turn the book into a good story. I look forward to a better effort next time.
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 Excellent offering from Stross
If John Varley bears the mantle of Heinlein for young adult fiction, Charlie Stross can at least be given credit for creating the essentially perfect homage to Heinlein's crazy years. Stross has definitely tapped into whatever Heinlein was thinking about when he wrote such standards as Friday, I Will Fear No Evil and practically any of the later Lazarus Long family series.
Saturn's Children moves along at a brisk clip, and the heroine-android stays perfectly in character throughout. While especially reminiscent of Heinlein's Friday, Saturn's Children is its own unique story, filled with Stross's usual cornucopia of imaginative, inventive concepts and gadgets, and will in no way disappoint fans of Stross's previous works.
Saturn's Children is a tale of androids and robots seeking out their living in the aftermath of humanity's extinction. It spans most of the planets in the solar system in its telling. Settings include Mars, Mercury and the moons of Jupiter, each more urban metal noir than the last. Stross makes no bones about the ugly truth of interplanetary travel, assuming no miraculous advances in drive technology or the costs of such voyages, and portrays such travel appropriately.
All in all, an excellent effort on behalf of Stross.
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 I love the premise of Saturn's Children
I happen to love the cheese-cake cover. I especially like the situations were the robots are trying to cope and survive with the loss of their human programmers. My only complaint is the plot; many times it seemed to have no direction. I'd like to see a second book on Freya's new world adventures.
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 Nothing sexy here, move along ( thisisnotmyname )
This should have been a likable book; I certainly started it with high hopes. We've got spaceships, awesome technology, a fetching heroine who is in perpetual peril of assassination by mutant ninja dwarves, and I know Stross can write stories that keep me enthusiastically turning pages to find out what happens next. Yet, I had to force myself to finish this book; it wasn't completely horrible, but reading it was more of a chore than anything else.
What went wrong? Well, for starters, I think Stross had trouble handling the fundamental premise of the book: the whole human race has died out (apparently through some sort of oversight), and the entire solar system is now populated by nothing but robots--who keep on pretending to be the human-like servants of mankind. As you know if you've read any of the other reviews, this puts our heroine, Freya, pretty much out of work, as she was created to be a sex toy for humans.
Stross could have played this as satire. We know he can be funny and satirical; this is the guy who wrote Atrocity Archives, after all. But no, Saturn's Children is completely and unrelentingly serious. Unfortunately, this is a premise that is difficult to take seriously. Levity would have eased the suspension of disbelief; as it was, I had a hard time figuring out why all these robots cared about acting like humans. Worse, I found it difficult to care about the robots.
I started out wanting to like Freya. However, to like a character, I must be able to empathize with that character to some degree. I've read stories in which there were robot characters who I liked--but that liking depends on how human the author makes his "robot" seem to the reader. The problem with this book is that every time I thought I might be getting to like Freya, Stross goes out of his way to hit me over the head with a reminder that she's a machine: she leaks hydraulic fluid from certain orifices, sweats "silicone lubricant", or takes an acetone shower to get squeaky clean. To be blunt, Freya is about as likable--and as sexy--as a fork lift. And that makes the book hard to like, indeed.
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 When Robots Run Themselves ( hyperpat )
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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