Saturn's Children

It seems the books I finish—i.e., the books I enjoy—I can’t usually recommend to others confidently. There’s a lot of really cool stuff here, and weirdly packaged. Charles Stross, the author, seems to be a computer–Japan–astrophysics nerd, and people like that are frequently lovable in real life but can produce stilted writing (the bits of Neal Stephenson I’ve read come to mind)—but all the storytelling elements Saturn’s Children were just perfect:

“I find her personality annoying. It’s like being [not forcefully] molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i’s.”

“Now let me tell you about nuclear space rockets: They’re shit. And I hate them.”

“Slowing time is shit. Aristo-class travel in the outer solar system is shit. Nuclear-powered space liners are shit. Two-timing scumbags who’re in love with my elder sister are shit.”

I can see people loving and hating this—I’m glad to be firmly in the former camp!

I’ve been dismayed to find that it takes just a touch of a lack of verisimilitude in depiction of AI to hopelessly lose me in the chasms of cognitive dissonance. (You try being a researcher in machine learning, and squeezing a tiny bit of classification performance out of a stupid dataset with some algorithm that takes twenty pages of math and thousands of lines of code to describe, and see if it sours you on lazy speculative fiction writers and their stupid handwavium.) Saturn’s Children for reasons not quite understood didn’t induce any such seasickness.

The main leap of faith I personally had to make was that all organic lifeforms went extinct after the robureaucrats running the planet stopped climate maintenance after humans went and died out. Deinococcus radiodurans and her extremophile cousins, comfortable even in the chill of interplanetary space, laugh at your boiling oceans. I focused on the story and swallowed this little lie to enjoy the ride. I will be reading more of Stross.

Charles Stross' work can be really hit or miss for me. This book was enjoyable, but seemed almost rushed. I don't mean rushed in terms of pacing, but almost like there was a lot going on in his head that never actually made it to the page, which made it a far less thoughtful book than it could have been.

There are some interesting ideas in here, particularly the musing on how a society of robots designed to serve humanity cope with the fact that humans are extinct, and thus their primary purpose in life is obsolete. There's a lot of heady thought wrapped up in that idea, including questions of free will. There is also a lot to think about in terms of identity as each robot is based off of a template persona's memories and can trade their own memories with others of the same template. These difficult issues are discussed, but Stross seems worried that too much exploration of these existential problems would get in the way of the story, which results in some of these questions being simply glossed over, making them feel too much like simple plot devices rather than the central issues that they are.

One thing I will note here is that many of the robots (even the non-humanoid ones) have a particular fascination with sex. It's significant that Stross points out that as humanity attempts to make robots in our own image, it is only natural that they would end up sharing our preoccupation with sex as well.

To sum up: interesting ideas and an entertaining read, but not nearly as complex as it could have been. I had fun reading this, but on the whole I ended up feeling disappointed.