Saturn's Children (Freyaverse #1) in Beyond Reality

Nov 12, 2010 mark monday rated it liked it

Shelves: scifi-modern

the ideas behind the theme What Makes a Slave a Slave are particularly interesting when considering how they are approached and transformed by the genre in which they appear. in fantasy and historical fiction, slavery is often depicted as a regular part of the environment, and if a central character is enslaved, it is merely an obstacle that is usually surmounted. in horror, the idea of a total loss of freedom, especially the loss of an individualized mind, becomes another facet of evil: possess ...more

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Oct 28, 2010 Sandi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, e-books, sci-fi

Saturn's Children is a book that I've wanted to read but have avoided because of the really embarrassing cover. Let's face it, a middle-aged woman would really look silly reading a book with big-boobed bimbo on the cover. Fortunately, this is 2010 and I've acquired an e-reader that allows me to discretely read anything, no matter what the cover looks like.

Charles Stross has been a hit-or-miss author for me. Saturn's Children falls strongly into the "hit" category. It's a hard sci-fi, post-human ...more

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Jul 07, 2008 Matt rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This review won't contain anything that I consider an actual spoiler, but because of the stories structure I'm going to mark this review out of an abundance of caution. I actually think the majority of readers will enjoy the novel slightly better with a bit more information about the setting going into it, but I'm not going to reveal anything that wouldn't have been revealed early in the story. The other advantage of a spoiler cloak on the review is that the subject matter discussed here is goin This review won't contain anything that I consider an actual spoiler, but because of the stories structure I'm going to mark this review out of an abundance of caution. I actually think the majority of readers will enjoy the novel slightly better with a bit more information about the setting going into it, but I'm not going to reveal anything that wouldn't have been revealed early in the story. The other advantage of a spoiler cloak on the review is that the subject matter discussed here is going to be unavoidably erotically tinged.

I've been a fan of Charles "the Slaad Father" Stross's work since long before he was doing anything that most readers would have identified as work. I read 'Singularity Sky' with great pleasure and have been looking forward to his science fiction works ever since, but none of the following ones that I read quite captured the giddy wild geek fun and inventiveness of that first novel or his HP Lovecraft inspired sci-fi until 'Saturn's Children'.

Charles setting is in many ways a radical departure from the setting of most of the rest of his science fiction in that it abandons the notion of an easily self-uplifting artificial intelligence or a generally tame nanotechnology. For me, this serves to enhance the believability of the story as one of the things I found off-putting in 'Singularity Sky' and 'Iron Sunrise' was the extent to which Stross bought into Kurweilian style techno-theology.

However, Stross doesn't really explain the technological basis of the setting until about page 60, by which time some confusion will have probably set in particularly given the sort of things which happen that are likely to throw off your suspension of disbelief or interest in the story. Once Stross begins to explain himself, the story gets measurably better. Briefly, Stross speculates the that problem of creating sophont class AI will prove so intractable and difficult, that humanity will take an obvious short cut to get there. The AI technology in the world of 'Saturn's Children' isn't designed from scratch, but is simply a copy in wires and transistors of the available prototype for sophont class AI - the human brain. As a result, the designers of the new AI neither fully understood it nor could fully control it and most importantly for the purposes of our story, the resulting AI carried with it much of the human emotional baggage and misadaptation. It's with this in mind that we must judge the apparently overly anthropomorphic denizens of Stross's creation. These particular robots, despite their non-biological bodies, have much more in common with the fleshy rutting androids of Silverberg’s 'Tower of Glass' or even PK Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' than they do with the typical AI sci-fi tropes.

In some ways, this is refreshing, because I hate some of the traditional AI sci-fi tropes and have come to hate them more the more I study the problem of creating an actual Turing testable AI. In other ways though, this brings with it its own problems, many of which may strike the average reader as more bizarre and less believable than some of Stross's wilder flights of fancy, if only because the technology involved here is less distantly removed and the normal sci-fi tropes are so well engrained and established. (And I should note that Kurzweil has recently adopted the position that the first sophont AI's will be copies of human brains, so it's not clear that Stross has really abandoned that nonsense anyway.)

The protagonist of 'Saturn's Children', Freya, will probably be a bit jarring to a lot of readers, and titillating to others. She's a robot which has been designed to act as a female sexual companion. Specifically, she was originally designed to be the star of sexually explicit films inspired by Japanese animation, and we are made to gather that she has the 'big eyed' nymphet aesthetic with the ability to adjust her hair and skin color to suit whatever particular fetish is involved. There is actually a point to this particular selection of protagonist other than being a geek sexual fantasy. Freya has become obsolete. The function which she was designed to fulfill is no longer needed or even possible. Because, even before she was activated, humanity - overwhelmed by the technology it created and the unintended consequences thereof - became extinct. Only humanities offspring species, in the form of the numerous now abandoned sapient servants humanity had created remains of the family of man. Indeed, not only has man gone extinct, but the entirely biological support system mankind needs to survive has been destroyed in the wake of mankind’s extinction as the newly liberated robot civilization failed to anticipate or deal with the challenges of extreme climate change once it lost the direction of his human masters. The Earth is desolate. So, acutely - perhaps more than any other choice Stross could have made for a protagonist - Freya embodies the theme of the abandoned robot.

This theme is of course not new to 'Saturn's Children'. It comes up frequently in the works of Clifford Simak, Disch's 'Brave Little Toaster', and famously in short stories like Aldiss's 'Supertoys Last All Summer' and even in films like Pixar's latest offering 'Wall-E'. Some would reasonably argue that the theme goes all the way back to science fiction’s first true masterpiece, ‘Frankenstein’. But Stross is able to break some new ground here with robots which are at the same time in some ways both better able and less able to cope with the loss of their creators and masters.

Freya finds herself lonely and depressed, aching for the unobtainable companionship of a human master she’s been programmed to provide for and at the same time fearing the veritable slavery that would come along with having a master she would unconditionally (and admittedly happily and joyously) obey. To a lesser extent, this is the emotional plight the entire robotic civilization finds itself in, although for many it’s not nearly as acute as their designed functions can still be fulfilled. This is a strong idea and Stross does a good job holding your attention with it and keeping the story flowing. Unlike many books I’ve read recently, I didn’t struggle to get through this one. I think however Stross undermines his story somewhat by creating a civilization which is somewhat hyper-sexualized, even by comparison to the one created by their ‘monkey’ creators as apparently the AI designers found that human sexuality was too deeply rooted in their nature to completely subvert or remove. The result is a world where deeply inhuman creatures are driven by deeply human needs, bizarrely including sexual response to tactile sensory input and physical intimacy. I’m not sure how much this will bother the average reader (in fact I’m quite sure that it will sell books), but it bothered me repeatedly even more on an intellectual level than a moral one.

I think the biggest failure of the book – and the main reason I can’t give it 5 stars - is that it suffers from what I call in science-fiction ‘Star Trek syndrome’. ‘Star Trek syndrome’ is when the technological basis and limitations of the setting is so poorly defined and so unreflectively introduced, that the technology involved is indistinguishable from the more poorly realized sort of magic – not because it is sufficiently advanced – but because its limitations and capabilities are defined solely by the needs of the plot. What can the crew of the Enterprise do with ‘Star Trek’ technology? Anything that they need to do to resolve the crisis that they face in one hours time, but never enough that the crisis doesn’t develop in the first place or have an easy resolution. Further, the exact limitations and capabilities will vary according to the particular crisis at hand, and the solutions of the past will have no bearing on what they are able to do in the future and will be on the whole forgotten. Above all, the large social implications of the technology will generally never be considered seriously, and any social implication that the technology may have will arise unexpectedly and never last longer than a single episode. Stross’s robots seem to suffer these problems, and I never felt that they arose above being anything but the creations of Stross as needed to serve the plot. It’s bizarre to imagine that the human brain could be readily retooled to serve bodies of all sorts of different shapes, but that the particular limitations Stross places on how they emotionally or intellectually functioned were the result of some intractable design problem. At times, particularly near the end when one of the big ‘secrets’ is revealed, this becomes a serious plot hole.

The book had three other flaws. The first is that Freya is both the protagonist of the story and the narrator. There are a lot of things to be said in favor of a first person narrative, but in science fiction it must be applied very carefully because the very unfamiliarity of the setting causes the first person narrative to tend to unwelcome didacticism. Stross is evidently very aware of the problem, because midway into the story he lampshades it when the narrator jokes with the reader about how she must seem at times like a boring tour guide. Overall, I think this will be something most readers can overlook.

Unfortunately, here I run out of room given goodread's character limit. To finish the review, I'm going to employ the comments. So, skip down to the third comment below for closing thoughts. ...more

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Dec 30, 2013 Wealhtheow rated it it was ok

Shelves: sci-fi, didn-t_finish

Humanity died out centuries ago, but they left behind space stations, wrecked eco systems...and the computer systems and robots they created to serve them. 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 ...more

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Aug 30, 2010 Michelle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Interesting and well-written but kind of disturbing. A lot of the ideas are fascinating but the way they are realized in this novel was a bit off-putting - not enough for me to stop reading though! The challenge for me was thinking through WHY I was finding things disturbing - sex robots are pretty standard sci-fi stuff, why did THESE ones bother me? The answer was, I found myself in the literary equivalent of the "uncanny valley" - the robots that are the characters of this novel are SO close t ...more

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