Saturn's Children Review

daddYman lent me a copy of Charles Stross' Saturn's Children: A Space Opera - the first book I have read by him. The book was intended to reflect both Asimov and Heinlein's influences and it succeeds. I greatly enjoyed reading it, mostly due to the really interesting future world that Stross created.

Many science fiction books feature a future filled with autonomous robots but Saturn's Children really takes a unique twist on this - as told through the mind of a femmebot after humans have gone extinct.

I did not think the story was overly interesting (it was a complicated whodunnit type mystery) but the interactions among the beings in the future was gripping. I read it mostly for the philosophy behind it, and would recommend it on that basis. A picked a short passage that I really enjoyed - the observation that a slave society damages everyone, not just the slaves.

Slave societies -- nor merely societies that permit the institution of slavery, but cultures that run on it--tend to be static. The slave-owning elite are fearful of how their own servants and increasingly devote their energy to rejecting any threat of change. Meanwhile, the underclass isn't allowed to innovate and has no interest in trying to improve things in general, rather than in their own personal lot.

Too many people do not understand how something like slavery is bad for everyone, not just the downstrodden. Similarly, I believe that a society which justifies torture (especially when based on the ridiculous scenario of an episode of 24) demeans and hurts everyone by putting a lower value on life and the ideals that were enshrined in our founding documents (and occasionaly refound throughout our history).

There is also an interesting robo-capitalism which I enjoyed thinking about as I read and the ways that game theory is more interesting when sortof autonomous robots are running everything.