Saturn's Children [Mass Market Paperback]

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.

Since several other reviewers have already described the overall plot and the main themes of this book - what does it mean to be a person, what does it mean to be free vs. slave, etc. - I'm just going to concentrate on my observations of the individual elements of the book that intrigued me, rather than repeating those. So please read this review in conjunction with several others, so you get the whole picture.

Charles Stross has a habit of paying specific homage to previous generations of science fiction authors in his books - for example, to Cordwainer Smith in "Glasshouse" - and in this one, he specifically mentions Heinlein and Asimov. However, there are many more references in here than just ones to Heinlein's and Asimov's books, though those are the most obvious ones. Some of them will be references only readers who have read some of the body of literature from 30 to 50 years ago will get (or even older - how many people will read the line about a character with urea and acetate and remember the old idiomatic phrase about being full of piss and vinegar?); others may be references that only younger readers will get. (For example, right at the beginning, where some of the characters are described as bishojo and chibi forms - mostly, it's going to be the younger generation that automatically knows what those are, from manga and anime; old fogeys may have to go look it up on the intertubes, which interrupts the reading experience.) And sometimes the references are more trouble than they're worth - giving two of the characters seldom-used nicknames so that one fleeting Shakespeare reference can be thrown in. Nonetheless, it's fun to try and recognize all the sources that Stross is giving credit to.

Stross's characters are a mixed bag, as far as level of characterization goes. Sometimes it gets a bit confusing - which aliases are sibs of which others? Whose soul chip is in whose body now? Wait, are Domina and Granita related? In general, though, most of the avatars are identifiable enough to follow the plot. And some of the characters, even bit parts, are truly one-of-a-kind: Lindy the sex-crazed shipping pod, for example, and Bilbo the hobo, who may or may not be saner than he sounds, and Paris the hotel front desk.

Stross also has a way with words that can cause one to splort soda out of one's nose on occasion, such as the beginning of one chapter: "There can be few sights more out of place in a luxury hotel than an angry bald ogress in a ripped black gown who storms in through the service entrance and demands to talk to the management..."

There are many other small bits that all add up to fun - the passing Monty Python reference, the ring-tailed lemur who snores, calling someone Igor, Dr. Ecks, the parody of the Creation Museum (and the mocking of Intelligent Design/Creationism in general). There are probably a few I missed, since I haven't read nearly as great a percentage of the literature ever written as Stross obviously has. Also, speaking of literature, I note that as with most of Stross, this book has had excellent editing, and is almost entirely free of the spelling confusions and grammatical errors that plague most genre and popular fiction these days.

Family reading alert: even though, as many people have pointed out, the plot for this book is largely based on Heinlein's juveniles, this is most definitely not a kid's book or even young-adult; there's far more sex in it than even in Heinlein's later adult novels, and some of it is very kinky sex. Probably not for anyone too young to buy the book with their own charge card.

Summary: although there are flaws - moments where it's hard to tell the characters apart (which was also a flaw in later Heinlein), a few points where the character's actions were a bit of a non-sequiter - this is nonetheless a move-right-along, action-packed space opera, with a great deal of humor and wit.

I thought this was going to be a wonderful book when I started it. Stross has quite an imagination for worlds unlike ours. He has created a world where humans are extinct and robots have colonized the galaxy because they don't have human biological restrictions. He has some really interesting ideas such interplanetary travel that starts with a giant ferris wheel that takes your pod into orbit where you're attached to something kind of like a ski lift that takes you to the next planet. He also has an interesting idea for a movable city that travels on railroad tracks across the face of Mercury to avoid the extreme hot and cold weather of each day as the planet turns.

I should have stopped reading after Mercury.

The main idea behind the story is that robots can experience the memories of their dead siblings by inserting their dead siblings' "soul chips" into themselves. Thus, your siblings' education, training, and memories can become your own. Unfortunately, this makes for confusing reading. The main character, Freya, switches between at least 6 identities. And other robots around her are switching identities, too -- even taking on some of Freya's alternate identities. I had no idea who was who and who was doing what to whom half the time. And then there was also the problem of not knowing if the character was dreaming, remembering, or living an experience of her own or of someone else.

You get to the end of the book and it's just more of a relief than an answer to any questions. I really wanted to like this book based on the strong beginning, but it just got more convoluted and confusing the further along it went. If I weren't stuck in a waiting room with this book, I don't think I could have finished it.