Daniel Lemire's blog

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Reading recommendation: Saturn´s children by Charles Stross


I just finished Saturn’s children. This is my third Charles Stross novel after Accelerando and  Glasshouse. Saturn’s children presents itself as a light space opera novel. The hero is a robot-sex-slave who is running for her life, in a post-human world. The author does a great job of making us feel for her as she struggles to understand what is happening to her. In this sense, it reminds me of House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. As you might expect, she thinks about sex quite a bit, and she has sex quite often too… with other robots.

The world depicted is beyond the singularity. In fact, human beings have disappeared. All these robot-servants are left to wander on their own without a sane legal or governmental framework. Human beings are gone, but likable robots, created somewhat in man’s image are struggling for emancipation.

Stross is one of my top five favorite scifi authors. His knowledge of Science, and Computer Science in particular, is genuine. Like all good scifi authors, he could have been a scientist, but we are lucky to have him as a writer instead.

Further reading: Stross runs a popular blog.