Book Review: Saturn’s Children

It took me a rather long time to figure out why I like Michael Crichton’s books a lot more than Tom Clancy’s books. At first, I thought I liked them both for the same reasons. They were dense techno-thrillers. Except they’re not. Crichton wrote science fantasy adventures, while Clancy writes stereo instructions about spies and soldiers. The devil is literally in the details.

When I read the blurb on Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children, I thought I was getting something Crichton-esque because it said something like, “What happens to a sex robot when all the humans are dead?”

(You see, the first half of that question sounds sort of juvenile but then the second half gets you to wondering. Clever.)

But I think the problem with this book is that Stross is too clever, too hardcore for his own good. A little too much like Clancy.

This is a work of near-hard science fiction. If you want to cruise through it, you’ll need to summon up everything you ever learned about chemistry, physics, biology, computer science, astronomy, and economics, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a strong grounding in modern Japanese anime and manga design styles while you’re at it.

Many characters are described as bishojo, chibi, super deformed, etc. You get the picture…or you don’t.

The story: Centuries after humans die out, our robots have built a cruel and dysfunctional society that spans the solar system, and Freya the (left over, second-class citizen) sex-bot becomes entangled in corporate intrigue, conspiracies, and assassinations surrounding a Very Important MacGuffin as well as secrets about her own identity.

The read: There is a lot of science and pseudo-science sloshing around between these covers. Stross did his homework. Chemical interactions, space ship physics and economics, complex slave-based social structures, and the time/space arrangements of the planets are presented in painful detail.

We learn, over and over, from page- to chapter-length sections, that traveling in space is slow, expensive, boring, and uncomfortable. It’s not very interesting the first time, and it becomes exponentially less interesting by the fourth time.

However, science aside, the story embraces a bizarre cast of robotic characters of all shapes and sizes and trots along quite briskly and cleverly for the first two thirds of the novel. Along the way, we visit several planets, learn about the hyperviolent robotic society of tomorrow, and experience many of this society’s greatest fears, like green and pink goo (plants and animals).

The problems: First, Freya the sex-bot tends to experience life in a rather sexual manner. She has sex with half the robots she meets or travels inside. This seems clever at first, but becomes progressive less interesting as the sex becomes less and less recognizable as such. This is where Stross is clearly channeling his inner Heinlein. That’s the older Heinlein, the one obsessed with naked societies, not the younger one with the clever ideas.

Second, the plot is at first too slow and obvious, and then sudden accelerates beyond recognition. During the first two-thirds, as long as you keep up with the techno-babble, you know more than the heroine about what’s going on, and you spend a lot of time waiting for her to catch up.

For instance, at the beginning of the story she smuggles an object to Mars. She describes the object in dry technobabble, but you can instantly recognize it as an egg. She does not know what an egg is (apparently robots have little interest in bio-history), and when the bad guys come looking for the egg, she repeatedly insists she has no idea what an egg or a chicken is. This gets old really fast.

And you begin identifying the villains long before Freya does. This also becomes tiresome as she races to catch up with the reader.

Then at the end, Stross decides to wrap everything up at near-light speeds. This is confusing because our robotic characters, many of whom are Cylon-esque clones of each other, have been switching “soul chip” identities and the politics unravel as the identities blur together. Everything is wrapped up with a bow, and it feels fairly unsatisfying.

And my last qualm is really a quibble. The book is written in the first person (a “shrug”-class problem) and in the present tense (a “groan”-class problem). Not my favorite style.

Still, Saturn’s Children is chock-a-block with great science fiction ideas and settings and characters and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a douse of “hardcore” genre content. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself wishing there was a little less science and a lot more fiction.