Link :Amazon, Goodreads. Price: £7.37
Freya has a problem. She is a perfectly designed concubine robot, designed not only to pleasure human beings but to take enjoy their pleasure. Unfortunately, the last of humans died out 200 years ago, 60 years before she was unboxed. Now she lives in a dystopic interplanetary society built by robots who were designed to be slaves and in which she has no place. Yet Freya’s place in things may turn out to be much greater than it seems.
Wow. This is proper, big idea Sci-Fi. The world building is sensational. Taking a sharp left from Asimov’s three laws (which get a shout out), Stross envisages how a society built entirely of intelligent, self-aware entities who were nonetheless designed for slavery might develop – and the results are both grittily believable and not very pretty.
Add to this ideas about how starships would work, attitudes to organic life, strands of prejudice and levels of servitude, how robots would choose to look if they were building themselves, the frustrating drive to continue the work of their dead creators, and what you have is a book absolutely teeming with ideas.
If that isn’t enough, the whole thing is wrapped up in a thrilling secret-agent style plot with more twists and turns than the Singapore GP. I haven’t read a book that so successfully marries fast moving plot with big ideas since MM Smith’s “Only Forward”, and this has spaceships and robots. “Saturn’s Children” is brilliant.
