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| Saturn's Children | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles Stross
Publisher: Ace Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $13.45
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New (39) Used (13) Collectible (3) from $9.16
Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 17083
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0441015948
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780441015948
ASIN: 0441015948
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW IN PERFECT CONDITION!!! crisp, clean text / tight spine / clean cover / ENJOY!
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Product Description
Sometime in the twenty-third century, humanity went extinctleaving 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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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Late-period Heinlein Juvenile for Adults July 1, 2008
47 out of 47 found this review helpful
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.
 I don't know what Stross was trying to accomplish but he failed July 22, 2008
10 out of 15 found this review helpful
I've read ALL of Charles Strosses books and loved every one. He is one of the best sci-fi writers out there. When I got this book I was terribly excited and immediately got to reading it.
When I closed the final page I wanted to call Stross and ask him exactly what drugs he was on when he wrote this. The plot is confusing. Was there a plot? Or was it just an IDEA of his that needed a book. I don't want to put spoilers in here but that's what this book is - an IDEA - and not a bad one. But the execution of that idea into a novel just stunk.
I hope he leaves this behind and produces the great stuff he has in the past. This one goes in the trash-bin.
fresh original look at a mirror humanoid culture July 2, 2008
8 out of 24 found this review helpful
By the twenty-third century humanity was extinct leaving behind androids that were built to feel and think and even dream like mankind once did. The androids created a caste system. The Aristos are nobles who own slaves expected to obey them or else. There are also some free independent droids who are mostly impoverished manual laborers.
Freya Nakamichi was made to be a sexbot, but thanks to her sibs is free. The mysterious Jeeves offers Freya a well paying job as a courier; she accepts. Her first assignment is to go to Mercury to pick up a biological sample that she is to place in her uterus and bring it to a lab on Mars. The task seems simple and straightforward although she has no idea what the sample is and why suddenly people seem to be hunting her for her "package". She eludes killers, thieves and an assortment of other predators as she races to Mars.
Imagine a world in which androids are the dominant species and act like humans in all respects except they cannot reproduce. Thus SATURN'S CHILDREN is about a culture the androids have forged centered on a caste system although the slaves and the free strive for a better life. Freya is a bot Lara Craft, a strong willed skilled beauty who uses brain and some brawn to think her way out of danger. Charles Stross answers the Philip K. Dick philosophical question Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? with this original look at a mirror humanoid culture.
Harriet Klausner
 Hard Sci Fi for this century July 6, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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
An interesting evolution in Stross' storytelling July 7, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Charlie Stross bounces between imagining a future filled with nanotech assemblers, strong artificial intelligence, and faster than light travel and describing the present and past using the established metaphors of sci-fi and fantasy. _Saturn_ describes a technologically advanced future, but compared with _Accelerando_ and _Iron_Sunrise_, this book is far more interested in exploring the human (robot?) condition. Equal parts _Rossum's_Universal_Robots_ and _Futurama_, _Saturn_ is an entertainingly quick read. There isn't much that is new here, but that isn't the point.
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