Saturn’s Children

Stross, Charles .Saturn’s Children: A Space Opera. New York: Ace, 2008.

See for a female robot — an important trope since at least the classic silent METROPOLIS — and robots more generally, and issues of gender, agency, slavery, and sex; and for a dialog with, to some extent Robert A. Heinlein, and more strongly Isaac Asimov.

Reviewed by Andrew Kelly, SFRA Review #285 (Spring 2008): pp. 30-31.[1]

Following the struggles of “Femmebot” Freya Nakamichi 47, the novel opens with Freya perched on a ledge floating high in Venus’s stratosphere, contemplating suicide. Freya is understandably listless: she is a robot designed and built as sexual companion for the centuries-extinct human race and was initialized long after their extinction. Given her primary purpose, Freya and her dwindling kind are chronically underemployed. [...]

Stross constructs a society built on slavery [...]. Aristos are former servants who worked most closely to humans and had the legal toeholds to buy their own freedom. A lapse into bankruptcy means body and will are literally put up for auction. The robots here are not the sometimes simple-minded automata of Asimov, operating largely without personality almost solely to provide labor. Stross’s androids are bound by the novel’s epigraph, Asimov’s Three Laws, but they are also subject to far more subtle and sinister psychological manipulations imposed by their “Creators.” Asimov’s Three Laws are predicated on the existence of humans, and humanity’s extinction renders only the most brutal and domineering traits apparent. Stross’s robots are human by another name, their minds closely emulating a humans, but psychologically designed to be dominated or dominate. [...]

[S]ex plays a major role in the novel. [...] The ability to have sex is pervasive and expected throughout, and rendering an intelligence asexual by depriving it of sex organs is a sin second only to slavery, and most entities with intelligence have some capacity for receiving and giving sexual pleasure. Everything from landing pods and fission powered spaceships to hotels and former domestic servants “does it.” (Kelly, p. 30) [...]

Saturn’s Children is a novel whose characters grapple with establishing their identities as individuals, exercising their autonomy and combating threats to their power as sentient willful beings. (Kelly, p. 31)

Discussed in Wikipedia article, which notes UK publication and an audiobook and describes the social setting as "a near-feudal android society."[2]

RDE, finishing, 13Jan21