I cannot emphasize strongly enough these videos are for mature audiences! Now that you are in the right frame of mind, I regret to inform you that in 'Saturn's Children' human beings, aka 'Creators', no longer exist. Flesh and blood homo sapiens somehow went extinct - exactly how is a bit confused at the time of the novel.
This is revealed early, so this is not a spoiler. There are male and female human-body-style robot models, but they are considered a bit archaic, given that most are designed for functions no one now needs, such as sexbots and butlers for flesh-and-blood humans.
Robot is a dirty word in Freya's future because of the connotations of slavery. Freya lives in a high-tech universe of switchable bodies and brains, and designed purposes set by body model. But whatever the body model, every bot has in its root module a program of instructions familiar to readers of I, Robot. The rules were introduced in his short story "Runaround", although they had been foreshadowed in a few earlier stories.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. However, the world the robots HAVE conceived of and built mirrors the one humans would have built - to their horror and regret. But they have no way to stop or change their original core programming, which was modeled on the human brain as closely as the Creators could design them.
So, much of robot culture is a tad sick and wrong, especially given their indestructible bodies, impervious to environments which would have killed humans, but they are slavishly devoted to following the political and hierarchical structures of Mankind, including aristocratic classes and slaved robots, based on a society where work for money and sustenance is essential for survival.
Freya no longer wants to live and she is contemplating suicide as the novel begins. However, she gets an email offering her a job which makes her curious. Assured by a sister bot it is on the level, she checks it out. Jeeves, her new boss and a humanoid bot originally designed to be a butler, turns out to be running some sort of a courier business, which has become swept up in politics, and even perhaps spying.
Freya is too desperate and too subservient sexbot to ask many questions, even after it becomes obvious someone has paid for assassins to kill her Is it possible she is unknowingly transporting pink goo or green goo animal or plant biological DNA from ancient earth , illegal everywhere in the solar system, in the secret compartment that Jeeves had built in her belly?
Could this be the key behind the sudden interest and offers and attacks behind the rapidly multiplying plots of various aristocrat bots and their slave-chipped goons? There are lots of fascinating fictional extrapolations based on current science research, and the progression of Asimov's Three Rules into ultimate slavery for sentient robots is shown with a Realpolitik clarity. This novel has a lot of robot sex, voluntary and not so voluntary, so it gets an 'R' rating from me.
It also is quite scientifically dense, and the plot involves an extreme confusion of interchangeable identities among the characters - if you, gentle reader, do not like uncertain narrators, noir mysteries, or multiples of similar-named antagonists, this science-fiction genre book will result in an unhappy week of down-time reading.
However, I liked it a lot. Jun 08, Cathy rated it liked it Shelves: science-fiction , read-in , satire. I was excited when I picked this up from the library. 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. 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.
Mar 25, C. 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. Dec 30, Wealhtheow rated it it was ok Recommended to Wealhtheow by: io9.
Humanity died out centuries ago, but they left behind space stations, wrecked eco systems 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 Humanity died out centuries ago, but they left behind space stations, wrecked eco systems She was built to please a long dead race, and now is too tall, too small-eyed, and too naturally submissive to be accepted in the higher echelons. Freya is about to commit suicide when events conspire to convince her to take a dangerous mission instead: to transport something biological to a new planet.
The premise of this book is really cool and could excite a great deal of thought, but Freya is such a non-entity, and the writing is so pedestrian, and the plot pays homage to an author I despise specifically, Heinlein's Friday , which decided me once and for all that I didn't have time in my life to read sf that made me feel less than because of my gender I just wasn't engaged by this book, and so I gave it up about halfway through.
View 1 comment. Nov 17, Kelly rated it it was amazing. I loved this book. I sometimes have a hard time reading Charles Stross. 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. He managed to convert chemical and mecha I loved this book.
He managed to convert chemical and mechanical processes into perfect emulations of human function and emotion and it was so cleverly done. And some of the sequences in this book are about the funniest things I have ever read. May 22, Jason Pettus rated it it was amazing. Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography cclapcenter. 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 Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography cclapcenter.
It is in fact a "space opera," as declared by Stross himself right in the book's subtitle, which he means in the classic, traditional way -- a sprawling epic that relies on massive spaceships and hard-science concepts to take us on a grand tour of the entire now-settled solar system -- and there's a very good reason that he dedicates it to the memories of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.
It's a dense book, be warned, one that not only assumes that you already know a fair amount of general science, but that is deliberately designed in the second half to be extra-confusing but more on that in a bit ; but if you can make it through the whole thing, you will be richly rewarded for it, with this "intellectual-friendly action thriller" having an untold amount of smart things to say about humanity, artificial humanity, the sociology of sociopaths, the meaning of "civilization," and a lot more.
In fact, this is a novel about robots that takes place hundreds of years after humanity has gone extinct, from a cause that Stross lets remain a mystery throughout; because as anyone who's familiar with Asimov's old work knows, as part of this A.
Let's not forget that when Asimov first came up with this concept smack-dab in the middle of Mid-Century Modernism , robots were envisioned by the general population as essentially smart toasters, so of course it would make sense to "bake" an unshakeable moral code into these artificial "positronic" brains, so that the robots don't get all uppity one day and decide to try to enslave the human race.
For example, under the rules of Asimov's universe, nearly all robots are legally required to be "owned" by a human, whether or not humans technically actually exist anymore; but since in the eyes of the law corporations are considered "people," this becomes the elaborate workaround for this A.
And why don't the robots just change the now-outdated human laws? Well, that's part of the problem of Asmiov's Three Laws being cooked into their brains, Stross shrewdly shows, that they're not authorized to change any of old humanity's existing long-term plans or bureaucratic infrastructures, instead charged with the continual creation of yet more new far-off colonies that no human will ever eventually sail to and live in; in fact, this is another element of the story that Stross makes great use of, showing us an uber-Kafkaesque society that has simply been chugging along with the status quo for centuries now, because of none of them being authorized to change the underlying structure of how the society works.
But then playing again off of one of Asimov's most famous robot stories the one Chris Columbus turned into the truly awful movie Bicentennial Man , about ten percent of these robots managed to convince their owners during the downfall of humanity to declare them legally autonomous sentient creatures i. It turns out in fact that Stross, just like Asimov, understands the true point of writing an entire novel about robots, in what could've otherwise been a pretty flat potboiler -- namely, to comment on humanity itself, to examine what specifically it is that makes us human, that simply can't be replicated in an artificial form.
Because it's a side-effect of this situation I'm describing that turns into the main conflict of Saturn's Children , and what fuels most of the developments of its highly inventive plotline which I will let remain mostly a surprise today, so don't worry about any spoilers unexpectedly popping up ; that without the empathy that naturally comes with being human, this moneyed elite of artificial people quite quickly become cruel slave-owners themselves without even blinking an eye, turning their entire galaxy-wide society into one where 90 percent of the citizens joylessly toil until death for the pampered pleasure of the remaining ten.
And then like I said, without giving too much away, we essentially get to explore this interplanetary society through the eyes of former prostitute Freya Nakamichi, now considered a gargantuan freak because of her uncanny similarity to a full-sized human supermodel babe, as she transforms over an extremely tight pages from slacker musician to hired spy and maybe-assassin, getting caught up more and more in a grand conspiracy involving the highly illegal black-market manufacture of "pink goo" and "green goo" animal and plant biological material, respectively , a good old-fashioned shoot-em-up noir that takes us all the way from Mercury to the brown dwarfs beyond Pluto, and nearly every planet in between.
It's this aspect, in fact, that allows Stross to rightly claim this as a space opera, and is where the Heinlein part of his dual dedication comes in; because make no mistake, Saturn's Children is vast and grand and epic in its scope, and in usual Strossian fashion offers up a whole series of cutting-edge hard-science concepts that'll make your head spin: from personal coffin-like gel-filled spaceships that are essentially flung to a planet's surface from orbit by a giant slingshot to a waiting maglev "net," to the sentient, deep-voiced, lone-wolf cargo craft who shuttle these one-robot capsules back and forth across the universe, using massive solar plasma sails for one half of the journey the "downriver" half, flying away from the sun and a nuclear fission reactor for the "upriver" trip back.
Now, all that said, there are things about this book that are sure to really bother some readers; as mentioned, for example, Stross deliberately adds a highly confusing element to the second half, with Freya ending up wearing for too long the "soul chip" of her "sister" Juliette too complicated to fully explain here -- imagine being able to record all your experiences and emotions on a disc that can be easily swapped between robots of a similar make, but with Stross handling the details with a lot more nuance , to the point where it becomes difficult to even tell anymore whether it's Freya or Juliette narrating any particular section, a crucial element of the surprise-filled third act but that will drive some people crazy anyway.
And be warned, by the way, that Stross uses the concept of violent robot sex as a plot device so often that it'll make some readers [particularly females:] uncomfortable, and especially the final character reveal about Freya which is surprisingly disturbing for a science-fiction action thriller.
But all that being true, please note that Saturn's Children is receiving a score in the 9s today, a rare event for a genre book here which means in my opinion that it transcends its usual genre limitations; or in other words, if you're the kind of person who only reads one or two SF novels a year, I'm confident in my belief that this should be one of them, a story that examines universal issues of humanity in such a smart way that you literally don't have to be a genre fan to deeply enjoy it.
As you can tell, it comes highly recommended today for everyone out there. Out of 9. I mean, for f-ck's sake, two of them are young-adult novels ; and if you've got multiple children's books being nominated for what's considered the most important award in adult science-fiction, to me that's proof that it was a bad year for adult science-fiction. But maybe that's just me. I mean, Cheez-Its, do you understand that I had to literally wrap a plain paper cover around my library copy of this novel and really, I actually did this , because as a big-city middle-aged intellectual I was ashamed of all the looks I was getting from others while out at cafes and on the bus with it?
It makes me want to scream at the people responsible for it, about how they're literally driving away thousands of people who would otherwise probably love this highly sophisticated, very adult novel, and how this is just one of a thousand tiny details that has the mainstream publishing industry in the toilet these days. If you're a SF fan and have never done so before, you really owe it to yourself to go back and at least sample the prodigious collection of stories and books Asimov put out under this series, throughout the second half of the 20th century; there are worse ways to start, for example, than with the story collection I, Robot and again, skip the movie version , plus the robot detective novel that started it all, The Caves of Steel.
View 2 comments. Sep 30, Kat Hooper rated it liked it Shelves: audiobook. Originally posted at Fantasy Literature. 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. This strange new feudal society carries on with normal business, free from the oversight and lordship of humans.
Freya is one of these cyborgs. 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. Everyone seems to be chasing Freya. 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.
Stross also explores the concepts of empathy, freedom and slavery, free will and determinism. The plot is constantly turning and twisting, which sometimes makes for a bewildering reading experience. She is simply wonderful. I love her lovely English accent, her tone, and her pace.
Jul 08, Denise rated it liked it Shelves: And commentary on the complicated influence of pheromones on interactions and hierarchies. But 3 stars for totally convoluted story. Jan 07, Rebecca rated it really liked it Shelves: speculative-fiction , future-earth. I can see it -- I read a lot of Heinlein as a teen, including some stuff that my parents probably didn't know about. 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? 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? 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. Heinlein was very much a product of his times. Aug 01, Nicky rated it it was ok Shelves: speculative-fiction. It did keep me turning pages, but mostly just to get to the end. So, overall, meh. For me. Reviewed for The Bibliophibian. Oct 27, 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 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. Anyway, huge amounts of really cool ideas. Quite an original idea for the set up of the whole story, well done.
Lots of other cool ideas along the way. But I do not like the voice of the main character. And Stross does not write great sex scenes, and since the main character is a sex robot, problem. Wording is clumsy or awkward in places. Takes too much time to get going, and then all the onion layers of mystery get thrown on and resolved at the very end at a breakneck pace. For all of his really cool and original ideas, why does he have to trot out the oh so oh so overused tired SF trope of the main characters going off to colonize another star at the end.
Utter lack of invention, creative bankruptcy in fact, sorry. Oct 15, 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 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.
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 cast. I was happy to accept her being a femmebot, after all, she had no choice in the matter, what I cannot abide is All the female characters are in some way subjected to being abused sexually, with the added insult that they are programmed to enjoy such treatment.
I kept expecting Freya to rise above it, but she never does. I read to the end hoping for some kind of reprieve but the final scenes layer the same adolescent pornography.
When I finished reading I felt sick to the stomach. No matter how beautiful the paint strokes are, it is still misogyny masquerading as art. Very disappointing from an author who writes science fiction as well as this. This is the first of Stross' books that misfired for me. Stross starts out by quoting Newton "standing on the shoulders of giants I remember liking Heinlein's Friday a great deal, but then that was 20 years ago when I was a Teenager.
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 This is the first of Stross' books that misfired for me.
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 little thin for me, particularly in the Foundation series.
So, what does that have to do with not enjoying this book as much? I'm not sure. The plot summary you can get elsewhere, so I'll just say that I didn't care about the Protagonist, and that the plot resolution wasn't satisfying. The robot sex was smirk inducing; more so because I kept getting Sorayama-inspired visuals from old OMNI magasines popping into my head. A very interesting premise this universe.
Mankind invented sentient robots to serve them but then became extinct, leaving all the robots behind. 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. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review. Books for People with Print Disabilities. Internet Archive Books. Delaware County District Library Ohio. This is the first volume in a series of two books and a short story so far known as the Freyaverse.
Apple Books Preview. Publisher Description. Customer Reviews. More Books by Charles Stross. Quantum of Nightmares. The Atrocity Archives. Equoid: A Laundry Novella. Some of the Best from Tor. The Jennifer Morgue.
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