Saturn's Children by Charles Stross Search Amazon for other books by or about Charles Stross. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

In addition to having the sixth planet of our solar system named after him, the god Saturn was renowned for his predilection for devouring all of his children, being aware of the prophecy that one day one of his children will cast him down from his throne and kill him just as he himself did to his own liege. He was aided and abetted in this, so the legends go, by his wife Rhea. This is relevant to Charles Stross's highly entertaining and indeed thought-provoking novel because it concerns the nature of a post-human future in which the androids and various types of robots live on and on, in some cases perhaps indefinitely. Freya (the goddess of magic and elves according to the Norse tradition of gods) is in fact a sex-bot, designed to give pleasure to her human master and willing (indeed desperate) to do whatever such a master might desire. She is one of a group of such creatures derived from the lineage of the Ur-robot mother Rhea, who was conditioned through the course of numerous lifetimes so as to become the archetypal representation of the lover-concubine. What good is she, then, when all of humanity has somewhat mysteriously died out? In particular, the benefits of miniaturization mean that most of the other creatures with which she shares the inhabited parts of the solar system and a little bit beyond and significantly smaller than her--she, human sized, has become a giantess who keeps banging her head against the ceiling and having to pay more for freight and storage because of her size--the costs of inter-planetary travel are so enormous that some people prefer to have their limbs surgically amputated and then buy new ones when they reach their destination. Forced to leave the slum on Venus in which she had been dispiritedly drooping while not pulling a rickshaw by the intervention of a bored but vicious aristo, she enters into a cross-planetary odyssey with numerous assassins on her tail and the need to engineer other people's personalities to survive and achieve the objectives that have been foisted upon her. Complications, inevitably, ensue.

It is characteristic of the fiction of Charles Stross for there to be both innumerable ideas and observations thrown out along the course of the narrative as if they were going out of fashion and, also, for there to be consideration of the much bigger picture. In the latter case, this focuses on the nature of free will for the robot community and their ultimate acceptance of their nature as slaves, having been imprinted at creation by the human-mandated rules demanding absolute obedience. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are considered to be quaint starting points in this much more grown-up universe. The aristos are those which are willing and able to enslave those who are weaker than them but, should a representative of the "pink goo" reappear--a representative of the dreaded biological replicator class, also known as organic life--then their inability to escape from their destiny of servitude will also become obvious. Being smart robots, a number of the more powerful creatures endeavour to put into practice various plans to alter destiny and, as an unfortunate but sadly necessary by-product, enslave the rest of intelligent life.

Stross is an excellent science fiction writer whose work embodies the desirable qualities of fascinating speculation about the nature of future society with the ability to tell a good story. Contemporary science fiction does not get much better than this.