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    Saturn's Children
    Saturn's Children
    Saturn's Children
    Audiobook13 hours

    Saturn's Children

    Written by Charles Stross

    Narrated by Bianca Amato

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Hugo Award-winning author of numerous best-sellers, Charles Stross crafts tales that push the limits of the genre. In Saturn's Children, Freya is an obsolete android concubine in a society where humans haven't existed for hundreds of years. A rigid caste system keeps the Aristos, a vindictive group of humanoids, well in control of the lower, slave-chipped classes. So when Freya offends one particularly nasty Aristo, she's forced to take a dangerous courier job off-planet.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 28, 2009
    ISBN9781440760440
    Saturn's Children
    Author

    Charles Stross

    CHARLES STROSS (he/him) is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has won three Hugo Awards for Best Novella, including for the Laundry Files tale “Equoid.” His work has been translated into over twelve languages. His novels include the bestselling Merchant Princes series, the Laundry series (including Locus Award finalist The Dilirium Brief), and several stand-alones including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn's Children. Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped catastrophes, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stakeout) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing, he tried to change employers just as the bubble burst) to technical writer and prolific journalist covering the IT industry. Along the way he collected degrees in pharmacy and computer science, making him the world’s first officially qualified cyberpunk writer.

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    Reviews for Saturn's Children

    3.5/5

    536 ratings36 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Loved this book.

      Probably has the best depiction of robots trying to be human I’ve ever seen in sci fi.

      Though what really hooked me in was the exploration of the Solar System by the main character.

      The machines being made of nanotech cells mean they explore and inhabit the different environments in ways humans can’t.

      The main character explored the deserts of Mars, ice mansions orbiting the Gas giants and more without a space suit. It makes for a wonderful image
    • 3/5
      Another posthuman story, this one closer to the time of humanity’s extinction, featuring a protagonist designed as a sexbot with inherent submissiveness to the extinct species, which makes her very sad. (All desire here is heterosexual because apparently humans only designed hetero robots.) Her programming means she’s aroused by partners’ arousal, so there’s a fair amount of casual sex and also rape, especially in the backstory explaining why one of the bad robots is bad but also some fairly coercive conduct towards the protagonist—whose personality changes a bunch when different chips are in her head, including one known as a slave chip. Anyway, she’s just trying to survive in an increasingly hostile universe—people who look like her are out of fashion—and gets swept up in a chase to acquire a real human who would be able to command all the powerful people because their programming was never changed. Not nearly as fun as Neptune’s Brood; I like Stross better focusing on accounting than sex.
    • 1/5
      This is where I quit reading Stross. Women who appear to be in their fifties are "girls." Men in their twenties still get to be "men." So far in the future, wouldn't we have gotten past that shit?.
    • 4/5
      (I received this audiobook through the Early Reviewers program on LibraryThing.)This book is heavy on the worldbuilding more than the other conventional attributes of good storytelling, but I enjoyed its vision of the far distant future. There are pivotal scenes which take place largely offstage, large numbers of characters whom we take the effort to get to know who end up being abandoned long before the end, and crucial plot points which are simply stated in a non-dramatic fashion to the point where they seem like offhand remarks. Yet the characters which work do work quite well, in my opinion, and the otherworldly settings work well as convincingly strange, and even if the central plot conceit (inhabited space dominated by the forces of economics) ends up giving impression of being the author's pet hobby-horse, it just kind of works for me in a way.By the end, I didn't know what the fate of the flying cathedral or the status of the undersea room stuffed with books actually was. Still, I'll remember the spacegoing piratical capitalist bats lead by Count Rudi, the pathologically self-absorbed Gravid Mother, and sweep of conspiracies thousands of years in the making for a while. Do I wish that Krina were more of an active agent in her own story instead of simply reacting to what happened to her? Yes, of course, but I am willing to give her a pass given the interesting way she describes what it was like to be given benthic mermaid form in an ocean hundreds of kilometers deep. The book is too long to make a good film, yet I would be pleased to witness some of these spectacles if someone were to try.The audiobook narrated by Emily Gray brought out the rather old-fashioned nature of the main character's viewpoint on things and lightened up what might have been a heavy infodump-prone read. I suspect that if I'd experienced this in written form instead of through this narration I would have given it only three stars, but that's the way this subjective matter of reviewing works.
    • 3/5

      Saturn's Children is a fast paced, action filled space opera with a somewhat convoluted plot and underlying mystery. The story is written in the first person giving the reader insight into Freya's increasing paranoia and confusion and although I don't have a problem with swearing in a book, her language seemed to be controlled by a censorship chip limiting her ability for profanity; shit being the only word reserved for up-the-creek-without-a-paddle bad situations and repeated often that it got annoying. The erotic element felt lackluster and fell flat for me and considering that the protagonist was created solely as a pleasure robot for an extinct race, the sex seemed emotionless and robotic (haha).

      I had high expectations of Saturn's Children, I thought I'd found something substantial that would stay with me long after I finished it and though I enjoyed the world building and well crafted story, it was much more lighthearted than I had expected despite the dark themes of slavery and extinction tackled in the story.

      It's been a while since I've read Sci fi and though it was OK and not great, this book still made me want to read more from this author and the genre in general.
    • 3/5
      Charles Stross' work can be really hit or miss for me. This book was enjoyable, but seemed almost rushed. I don't mean rushed in terms of pacing, but almost like there was a lot going on in his head that never actually made it to the page, which made it a far less thoughtful book than it could have been.

      There are some interesting ideas in here, particularly the musing on how a society of robots designed to serve humanity cope with the fact that humans are extinct, and thus their primary purpose in life is obsolete. There's a lot of heady thought wrapped up in that idea, including questions of free will. There is also a lot to think about in terms of identity as each robot is based off of a template persona's memories and can trade their own memories with others of the same template. These difficult issues are discussed, but Stross seems worried that too much exploration of these existential problems would get in the way of the story, which results in some of these questions being simply glossed over, making them feel too much like simple plot devices rather than the central issues that they are.

      One thing I will note here is that many of the robots (even the non-humanoid ones) have a particular fascination with sex. It's significant that Stross points out that as humanity attempts to make robots in our own image, it is only natural that they would end up sharing our preoccupation with sex as well.

      To sum up: interesting ideas and an entertaining read, but not nearly as complex as it could have been. I had fun reading this, but on the whole I ended up feeling disappointed.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Bloody good book, thoroughly enjoyed this space based robot sex novel. I wasn't sure what to expect when I read the synopsis on BoingBoing, but now I'm glad I read it. Lots of science-y bits to keep the geeks amongst us amused and a fair twist at the end. If you get the hardback, don't look at the photo of the author, it's hard to take the sex-scenes seriously if you do (as serious as you can take inter-robot-romance).
    • 4/5
      A corkscrew of a plot, but quite enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      Humanity has gone, the last people having died out several hundred years ago. But before they died out they created AI, and androids that could colonise world's for them, and work as servants. Stross takes us on an merry ride across the solar system's colonies as Freya, one of the last femmebots built soley for humans pleasure, tries to avoid being killed by the aristrocat androids, while trying to also find meaning for her existence when she has no humans left to satisfy. I found the idea of a society of AI continuing past the end of humanity an interesting one. But having to explore those through a lovebot were overly sexual for me.
    • 3/5
      I generally like Stross but I found this one a bit wanting. The premise is great - humanity is gone, but has left behind robots and androids who continue to makeover the solar system. It's all done with plausible tech (so, for example, there's no FTL travel). And yet I felt the narrator seemed too human. Apart from the occasional strange word choice (reminding me of some classic Data lines from STNG), the narrator could as easily have been in one of this Laundry novels. Still, it's a great premise and I'm curious to see what he does with it in the follow-up.
    • 4/5
      Freya Nakamachi is a sexbot who was unfortunately "born" shortly after the human race went extinct. So she and her sisters spread out across the solar system, without much meaning in their lives. Since they are so fundamentally useless, they're at the bottom of the social scale. On Venus, Freya accidentally pisses off a very rich and powerful aristocrat. Freya books a quick passage off-world by getting a job as a courier to far-off Eris, and finds out that some of her sisters have been down this road before, and maybe they were up to more than she thought.This is actually the FIRST book in a series of which I already read the SECOND book, Neptune's Brood. They take place in the same world, but thousands of years apart and there's no character overlap. It's really fascinating to see the progression of "human" civilization over the course of so many years. As you might expect, there is some mildly graphic sex in here, but it's not cheesy or flowery, and most of it is sexbot + spaceship or sexbot + robotic sleeping bag, so it's just funny. As with Neptune's Brood, the mostly-female characters are spectacularly written. It's a solidly good read, for sure, but not as fabulous as its sequel. Freya is interesting and believable, but not as awesome as Krina.P.S. Don't judge this book by its terrible U.S. cover - the author says on his blog that he doesn't like this cover and he had no say in the matter.
    • 2/5
      I realized after giving up on this that I've read quite a few of Charles Stross's books but I haven't really loved any of them.
      So why do I keep reading them? I think it's because they always sound really interesting, but the execution never quite lives up to the promise. I really like his characters, but there's just always too much STUFF in the way of the story!
      In this one, even after I stopped reading I still kept thinking about the main character and sort of wondering what was happening to her, but while actually reading it I just got bored with all the descriptions of technology.
      This book was billed as being like "late Heinlein" but I don't really see the comparison other than the fact that the protagonist is a sex robot. Late Heinlein in my experience is kind of ooky and full of cringy ideas about women, but at least the people don't take a backseat to the stuff.
    • 3/5
      Briskly paced, often laugh-out-loud funny, and occasionally genuinely sexy. I found the class politics a little heavy-handed and some of the jokes were a little in-jokey - I was pulled out of the story even as I giggled. (Plot capon!) But I just adore Stross in general and this was definitely good fun.
    • 5/5
      The best Stross book I've read to date. Spectacularly creative and containing just the right mixture of cyberpunk, hard sci-fi, and gripping character and world building.
    • 3/5
      I picked up this book because I remembered Charles Stross as having made some of the more interesting contributions to the AD&D second edition Fiend Folio. Stross dedicates this book to Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and the influences are clear, particularly the latter's 'Three Laws of Robotics' robot novels and the former's 'Friday'. (The climax of the book takes place on Eris in the domed city of Heinleinberg too). This is an interesting hard-sf tale set almost entirely within the future Solar System, in a future where humanity has mysteriously died out and left its intelligent robot servants to colonise the worlds. The robots are slaves to non-existent masters, and the society they have created is also an unhealthy slave-holding one. The narrator is Freya, a pleasure bot made for a now-vanished species, who becomes an interplanetary agent and performs various feats of derring-do. I like the hard-sf elements such as physical constraints on travel, the exploration of ideas about what such a robot civilisation might be like, and the humour of this book. Some parts of the tale are confusing; the point of view of the narrator lurches around a bit and there are multiple personalities involved. Sometimes the robots acted like humans in robot clothing, which made them less believable. Overall though it was an interesting read and I do appreciate science fiction which stays relatively local (spatially).
    • 4/5
      This story is a classic thriller, in which our gorgeous and sexy heroine Freya offends aristocrats, has to flee for her life, travels widely encountering temporary friends and lovers, has several narrow escapes from her pursuers, and finds herself entangled in complex conspiracies. Except that everybody is some form of artificial intelligence, and the human race is extinct.The characters are very human, because in this universe AI was developed by modelling the human brain. And Freya was built as a courtesan, so she's very human-seeming. And so it's jarring when you're settling into the story and suddenly realise that Freya has packed herself into a box to be mailed off on a decades long trip to another planet, or that she's having sex with a multi-tonne spaceship, or getting drunk on sulphuric acid. These off-kilter events give the story both humour and a surprising philosophical depth. Stross doesn't pound in the "what does it mean to be human?" line, but it often sneaks up on you.
    • 4/5
      This book is a fun romp through a post-human space populated with androids. Its fun, its witty, its deep, but not angsty or dark.Here we get Rhea, an android created for sex. Only, her model became defunct after humans died out, so Rhea has to find a way of existing without relying on her primary purpose. As the story unfolds, secrets and plots are revealed, with Rhea an unwitting key player.I liked the book. Characters were well rounded, the universe is well written. Rhea is a sex-bot, and it can be written a bit heavy handed, until I fully understood that she cannot help who she is. The one thing that is damned annoying, why the Cover?! It was drawn as if to attract every adolescence boy out there, the sort of book that you don't want your mom knowing you read.Outside of that, a good book to read.
    • 2/5
      While the premise seemed interesting enough, Saturn's Children suffers from a multitude of issues. One problems is that the story overall feels like a generic sequence of events that is supposedly strung together by this macguffin mystery that's surrounding the protagonist. In addition, the plot doesn't really come into fruition until about the last 10 percent of the book. So in cases like this where the plot is almost absent, the weight of the story needs to be supported by the protagonist itself. Considering that this book is about the dilemmas of a fembot who's primary function became obsolete once humanity became extinct, there's really little to distinguish between her and a human, personality-wise. Sadly, there are moments within this book that do shine, but most of them are concepts regarding interplanetary travel, which are few and far between.
    • 3/5
      Mildly smutty but quite fun concept.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic book! I know the premise sounds a bit seedy: a retired sexbot exploring the universe...but trust me, this is a fantastic read that deals with complex issues such as identity, emotions, and sibling rivalry to name but a few.
    • 4/5
      This is certainly not the deepest and most meaningful book ever written, and it makes no pretense at being so. This is a fun, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes upsetting, romp through a universe that doesn't exist.
    • 4/5
      Freya Nakamichi-47 is an android designed as a sexual companion for humans, but in the twenty-third century, humans are extinct, and Freya and her sister models have to find other ways to make a living in the all-robot society that spans the solar system. Freya offends a member of the robot aristocracy, and takes a job smuggling restricted biological materials in order to get off of Venus. This starts her on a tour of the solar system as she is drawn into deeper levels of espionage among the robot ruling class.I enjoyed the novel, but it seems like a fairly minor work by Stross without the complexity and depth of ideas of some of his other novels. It is written as a tribute to the later Heinlein novels, which means there is a lot of non-explicit, somewhat silly sex, but without the pontificating of the Heinlein books. I enjoyed a lot of the ideas such as the structure of the robot society and how it cam about, and its fear of biological life as "pink goo" replicators. The depiction of the tedium of space travel is something that does not usually show up in science fiction. The story does get somewhat confusing though, and beyond the interesting concepts there is not much else in this novel that left a lasting impression on me.
    • 4/5
      Sexbots, both male and female were created just before the humans died out. Specifically designed to fall in lust with a human the moment they set eyes on one they are now slightly redundant, but the heroine and her kind are able to avoid becoming slaves to the robot 'aristo' class by doing odd jobs around the place.I have the feeling I could have liked this more. The story was brilliant, the idea of robot slavery an interesting and likely future, and I loved the reality of space travel, cramped, uncomfortable and long. However, due to poor character development, and the changing of names all over the place (and one design of robot all having the same name), I constantly felt I was missing something.I really enjoyed this, don't get me wrong, and would recommend it to any sf fan, but I would advise them to take note of all the characters. None of them stood out to me.
    • 4/5
      Well handled post-apocalyptic setting in which life after meatbag humanity goes on pretty much unfazed in the form of human equivalent AI robots. You don't need me to tell you the plot, but it's the sort of book where, if anything, the main character is not wanton enough. Space travel is still rubbish even if you're a robot, and underclocking your brain to live the tedium and confinement in slow time doesn't help all that much. Brilliant conceit, but then all of Stross's conceits are brilliant. Written, I'm told, as a tribute to late period Heinlein novels, so sex, intrigue and labyrinthine plotting abound.MASSIVE SPOILERSI think one of the most striking things about this book is that it thinks itself outside of humanity by presenting a world where our veneration of squirty meat organisms, life, in other words, is discarded as irrelevant, because it's the way we think and our culture that defines who we are. It's the perfect set up for a post-humanity culture who don't notice climate change until the Gulf of Mexico hits a rolling boil, one of my favourite gags in ages. The robots here are us. In this world the prospect of biological humanity returning means nothing good, and it's hard to root for that when living among a culture that has outgrown its need for us.
    • 4/5
      Humanity has become extinct, but civilization and galactic colonization continues to hum along, thanks to a variety of highly sentient androids and other artificial intelligence, which have amusingly oriented themselves into a highly rigid class conscious society. The narrator of our story happens to be an “escort” android (a/k/a a sexbot), manufactured in the form of its creators. As a result, the android is obsolete, both as to form and function.This novel is not the easiest to read. I frequently found myself rereading paragraphs in an effort to process the information therein. This is partly due to the fact that it is extremely descriptive, especially as it related to science and engineering, and partly due to the fact that the protagonist and many of the other characters wear the memory chip of “sister” or “brother” replicants, making much of the action confusing as it relates to point of view and actual identification of many of the actors. Starting at about page 150, I became somewhat lost and confused and can’t swear that I unraveled all the details by the time the novel ended.There is some outstanding hard science fiction contained in this novel (orbital space tethers, migrating Mercurial cities on rail, fascinating details of energy sources, space and interstellar travel), though perhaps not presented in the best form for easy consumption. Of particular interest are the travel sequences, of increasing length and complexity (Venus to Mercury to Mars to a Jovian moon to a dwarf planetoid outside the Kuiper belt and finally to a nearby star system) and the methods of propulsion, length of travel and the implications thereof. There are some excellent and witty sections in this book, for example, robots debating the philosophy of evolution vs. intelligent design as related to artificial intelligence. Space ships, hotels and other usually inanimate objects are not only sentient, but sexual creatures. Much of the novel revolves around the concept of “pink goo”, a/k/a human DNA/RNA, the discovery of which could result in reintroduction of the human species with thought provoking implications. All in all, an excellent novel from the viewpoint of hard science fiction, however, at times a chore to read due to the excessively confusing plot lines.Five stars for the science, two stars for the overly confusing story.
    • 4/5
      Another of this year's Hugo nominees I read in the same month (along with Zoë's Tale) and again wasn't impressed. Story didn't grip, characters neither. Well executed, some neat ideas but...
    • 4/5
      If you've been reading Charles Stross you'll notice that many of the usual tendencies are in operation in this story. The put-upon female protagonist; check. The plot based on a covert scam; check. Much musing on the post-human future; check.This time around we have a world without humans (having stupidly offed ourselves) and our artificial creations have picked up right where we left off with our arrogance and, dare I say it, our inhumanity. As those lines of servants (can you say 'house slaves'?) who were closest to humanity in our last days have managed to insert themselves at the top of the social food chain over 90% of the AI population. Mankind having failed to do their creations the favor of collective manumission before shuffling off this mortal coil.Thus we find our heroine Freya (a sex worker in a world without human clients) early on the run from what looks like a chance encounter with an overbearing "aristo." She thus falls into a world of private covert operations, where the great prize is the recreation of biological life forms, and where the dominant species is the red herring.It's in this scenario that Stross makes heavy use of one of my less-favorite tropisms; that of the downloaded personality. However, I find it deployed in a more efficient fashion then in "Accelerando" or "Glasshouse," as the characters in this novel are very dependent on the knowledge gleaned from their parallel selves, and there are no guarantees that even their other selves are trustworthy. In a middle section that is rather roundabout, this keeps the suspense up until the countdown to the big bang at the climax (ahem) and onto a satisfactory conclusion.As to Stross' observation that this is his homage to late-period Heinlein, this is certainly the case, down to our heroine who goes on and on and on in a chatty verging on blathering fashion. There's a good reason for this in the end but there are points in the novel where the data dumps are very long, even for Stross. On the other hand, just because Stross respects Heinlein, it doesn't mean that he isn't above satirizing the prophet (there's a shock), and there's much in this book that is absurdly funny, and could have been played up with even more absurdity had Stross chosen to do so. Never say that the man doesn't respect his characters, even when he puts them through the wringer.
    • 3/5
      Freya's a sexbot activated after all of humanity has died, so she can't fulfill her true calling. The posthuman romp crosses the solar system with meditations on the frailty of man, slavery and the relationship of man to machine, love as submission, and the impossibility of space travel.All of that is embedded in a fine intrigue thriller, but the failure here is that the conceit keeps poking through, like threads unwinding from a cheap suit. You can ignore the robot dreaming, the sleep, the gasoline cocktails, etc. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away and if you pull on them at all the whole thing unravels.It's not Charlie's best, but it's fun and good.
    • 4/5
      Set in a future when humanity is extinct, intelligent robots carry on the task of spreading civilisation, having colonised the solar system and sent ships to nearby stars. These are not soulless Asimovian robots as their minds are copies of archetypal personalities, created by conditioning using human experiences (some extremely unpleasant). This conditioning also inculcates basic emotions and needs: for example, robots can enjoy a drink or two (though not of alcohol) and can experience the pleasures of sex when they 'link up'.For control purposes, humans made serving them the deepest desire of a robot. Now humans are gone, 'aristo' robots use this servitude capacity to enslave other robots. Their greatest fear is of 'pink goo' - animal cells of any kind that could, in theory, be used to rebuild one of the lost human 'Creators'. A human, could, simply by their presence, control any and all robots using their inbuilt servitude routines.The novel follows Freya, one of a defunct concubine archetype, cloned from the original called Rhea, who gets involved in something illegal that involves smuggling pink goo. Freya is given the 'soul chip' (memories) of another of her archetype, Juliette, and starts to be influenced by Juliette's experiences. The abilities to swap soul chips (and thus identities) and to blank parts of soul ships complicates the plot no end. The action takes on Venus, then Mercury, Mars, Callisto and finally 'Heinleingrad', on distant Eris, as aristo factions like the Black Talon, and robot archetypes, especially one modelled on the Jeeves character, struggle over the ultimate prize...Ironies abound. Humans, as their creators, are like gods to robots. Robot society is as venal and despotic as that of their creators. In their restless journeying (space travel for robots is uncomfortable and slow but usually not fatal) they are driven by the expansionist dreams of their creators, as robots have no purpose of their own. Despite decades of AI research, 'intelligent' robots are still as much a figment of the imagination as warp drive. While on the surface this novel is a romp built from retreaded components from earlier writers, underneath it raises issues about self-hood, freedom and the purpose of life, none of which robots really have.