Saturn's Children (Stross Novel)
Saturn's Children is a 2008 science fiction novel by British author Charles Stross. Stross has said that it is "a space opera and late-period Heinlein tribute" (specifically Heinlein's Friday). It was nominated for the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and was a finalist for the 2009 Prometheus Award.
The novel describes the travels and perils of Freya Nakamichi-47, a BishÅjo gynoid in the distant future. Humanity is extinct and android society has assumed a near-feudal form, with "aristos" and "arbeiters" (a term from the German word Arbeiter, worker) having spread throughout the Solar System. Freya, a robotic courtesan at loose ends after the mysterious extinction of the human race (her "One True Love"), becomes a courier for the Jeeves Corporation and learns of a shadowy conspiracy to overturn, or perhaps even control, android society. Soon she is on the run with her identity and her very existence threatened.
The novel includes numerous references to the works of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, especially to Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which still guide the robot society, and Heinlein's novel Friday, as the protagonist is an artificial woman, designed and trained to make love to humans and meet their every erotic desire, in a time when none exist, and any near match overwhelms her with lust and romantic longing. Freya and her kind are condemned to an existence without love, and must face suicidal despair and the murderous whims of their rulers alike.
She travels extensively at the bidding of a mysterious "Boss," and impersonates an aristocrat traveling on a spaceship as part of a mission in which she carries a mysterious egg tied to a plot to overthrow an empire. She also has a relationship to a man named "Pete." Even her name (Freya) hints at Heinlein's novel, and she is actually called "Friday" at one point, likely as a joke.
Saturn's Children is the earliest known work of fiction to include the dwarf planet Eris as a setting. Since its publication, other novels have mentioned Eris.
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Famous quotes containing the words saturn and/or children:
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Children from humble families must be taught how to command just as other children must be taught how to obey.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)