Hub 129 by Various

Author:Various
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy
Publisher: Right Hand Publishing

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REVIEWS

Saturn’s Children

by Charles Stross

Orbit

rrp £7.99

reviewed by martin willoughby

I wasn’t too impressed with Halting State, but, not wishing to ignore an author on the basis of one novel, I decided to give this one a go. I’m glad I did.

I was expecting another SF Comedy/Thriller, but instead got an SF

Thriller/Comedy. At first I thought, “this isn’t funny”, but the story was so good that I ignored the lack of laughter and continued anyway.

It’s told from the point of view of Freya, a courtesan robot who was designed for escorting human males and providing sexual services, but was built after humanity became extinct. Needless to say, she’s a little frustrated.

She lives in a solar system run by aristo robots who keep the rest of the robots as slaves via slave chips inserted into the back of their heads. When the book opens, Freya’s on a cruise ship high in the Venusian atmosphere contemplating suicide, like so many of her siblings have done in the past. An aristo robot takes exception to her, for reasons that only become clear towards the end of the book, and Freya has to leave Venus in a hurry.

What follows is a gripping story of cross, double-cross, triple-cross with several erotic moments (all done in the best possible taste) in between. Freya leaves Venus as a courier for JeevesCo to take a package to Mars, upsets another aristo and has to hide on the outside of the spaceship hiding from the pink police... no, not that kind of pink.

After being co-opted into being a spy, she uses her agent’s bank account to get some serious upgrades before she gets killed. Naturally, things don’t go according to plan and she gets caught and slave chipped. How she gets out of it is interesting and not fully revealed until near the end of the book. There’s nothing to really dislike about this book. It’s very well paced and has more SF ideas than you can shake a stick at. At times you have to concentrate really hard so as not to lose the plot (literally), but that’s no bad thing.

The author has also created a universe that has innumerable possibilities for future stories. Not only do you have an underground movement seeking to overthrow the slave-owning aristos and give every robot freedom, but you also have non-slave workers in the outer system and beyond seeking to remake humanity from strands of DNA left behind.

The main character, Freya, is particularly well drawn and we get to see everything from her point of view. She is one of many robots of the same design, but due to the way they were raised and taught, in order to have distinct personalities, she is also unlike her sibs. I’ll let you find the rest out for yourself as it’s far more interesting, and surprising, that way.

The other main charters work for JeevesCo, a company staffed by robots built as butlers... as if you couldn’t guess. Seeing as there are very few robots, and no

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