From the Bookshelf: Saturn's Children
Mar. 6th, 2023 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerLast fall, I was able to make it back to my city library’s book sale for the first time in years. More than that, I took a close look at the science fiction table and bought several volumes off it, some of them not that old. I’ve alluded in the past to a number of reasons why I don’t read science fiction the way I once did, and some of them don’t seem to reflect all that well on me. Beyond buying these books, though, I also got to reading them instead of just leaving them to sit alongside other science fiction novels that have waited for a long time while I’ve kept picking up nonfiction books I’ve already read.
One of the first volumes started into was an anthology of short stories titled New Voices in Science Fiction, edited by Mike Resnick. In noticing its copyright date was 2003, however, I had suppose the voices weren’t that “new” any more. The problem beyond that was that I recognized almost none of the authors looking at their names. The two I did straight off were Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross (collaborating on a single story), and Doctorow is more familiar to me as an online figure raising constant warnings about closed source, copyright, and corporate web sites, which I recognize is important in its own way but still unfortunately leaves me convinced I’m not inclined or able to be that holier-than-thou. I had read one book by Stross before, but Accelerando and its “living through the Singularity” story seems to have gone over my head.
For all of that, and for some of the stories in the anthology seeming more “fantasy” than science fiction to me, I did find the book varied enough to be interesting even if I wound up deciding a post just about it, including a capsule opinion of each concentrated dose of ideas and style, was one more thing I didn’t need to push myself to express. With the anthology finished, though, I moved on to a science fiction novel that just happened to be by Charles Stross, Saturn’s Children.
The blurb inside the front cover might have summarized the novel’s setup much quicker than the actual story’s bit-by-bit revelations in best world-building style. That story begins with Freya Nakamichi-47 looking down from an aerial city in Venus’s upper atmosphere and contemplating jumping down to where even her advanced android body will melt; her design was meant as a “sexbot,” but humanity very quietly went extinct before she was activated, and then the androids left didn’t quite bother to manage Earth’s climate until the oceans boiled and the planet was sterilized. (I do wonder if a different author would bring up “extremophile bacteria,” and then wonder if a different author again would start discussing the Cambrian Explosion and the unlikelihood of “evolution repeating itself,” but that’s a matter of “no longer paying attention to the actual story.”) However, before Freya can cut the story short through an apparent lack of purpose she’s got in trouble with members of the android aristocracy that owns most of the erstwhile servants of mankind, and before she managed to get a job with an interplanetary courier company (which gets to the end of the blurb), I just happened to have noticed I hadn’t got quite as far away as I might have thought I would from the less rigorous diversions I consume great quantities of these days.
The aristocrats are described as “bishojo” and “chibiform dwarfs”; later on there’s a description that concludes with “anime, not animated.” I’d already looked up the copyright date of 2008 and supposed “anime character designs” would be familiar enough by that point even to people who weren’t interested, or had outgrown it and moved on to something else, perhaps even something understood to be more thoughtful. I suppose I was also inclined to ponder the copyright date when comments about androids arguing about that religious belief of evolution cropped up, and did contemplate “ah yes, once upon a time the sort of thing that’s a skewed commentary on was a major ominous shadow on the future” (although it now might only be an ominous subfactor supporting the current threatening shadow). In any case, when Freya is modified to pass as an aristocrat as part of her new job I did wonder about bringing up “just think of yourself as being adapted to service a human with a ‘2D complex’”; if Stross did get around to mentioning something similar himself I didn’t manage to pick up on it.
That strange note aside, I did stay engaged with the actual story. There’s a rather small note on the cover about the novel being “a space opera,” but in the “no matter how hard you think actual space travel is, it’s harder than that” descriptions and Freya’s casual dislike of something humans were foolish enough to have believed they could survive I did get to pondering recent science fiction authors and how many of them have their own jaundiced views of something earlier authors injected into the larger culture. For all of that, the book’s outward journey in increasing leaps was more interesting than another invocation of “science beyond science” might be taken as, and there were plenty of narrow escapes along the way. There was also a certain amount of sex even for a “sexbot” without designed-for clients, if not explicit; near the end of the book things get more troubling that way, though.
With that warning given, the novel still impressed me with its sweep and ideas. Its conclusion was complicated to sort through, and I might not have put all of the pieces together along the way. That I did get through it at all still manages to matter a bit right now even so.
One of the first volumes started into was an anthology of short stories titled New Voices in Science Fiction, edited by Mike Resnick. In noticing its copyright date was 2003, however, I had suppose the voices weren’t that “new” any more. The problem beyond that was that I recognized almost none of the authors looking at their names. The two I did straight off were Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross (collaborating on a single story), and Doctorow is more familiar to me as an online figure raising constant warnings about closed source, copyright, and corporate web sites, which I recognize is important in its own way but still unfortunately leaves me convinced I’m not inclined or able to be that holier-than-thou. I had read one book by Stross before, but Accelerando and its “living through the Singularity” story seems to have gone over my head.
For all of that, and for some of the stories in the anthology seeming more “fantasy” than science fiction to me, I did find the book varied enough to be interesting even if I wound up deciding a post just about it, including a capsule opinion of each concentrated dose of ideas and style, was one more thing I didn’t need to push myself to express. With the anthology finished, though, I moved on to a science fiction novel that just happened to be by Charles Stross, Saturn’s Children.
The blurb inside the front cover might have summarized the novel’s setup much quicker than the actual story’s bit-by-bit revelations in best world-building style. That story begins with Freya Nakamichi-47 looking down from an aerial city in Venus’s upper atmosphere and contemplating jumping down to where even her advanced android body will melt; her design was meant as a “sexbot,” but humanity very quietly went extinct before she was activated, and then the androids left didn’t quite bother to manage Earth’s climate until the oceans boiled and the planet was sterilized. (I do wonder if a different author would bring up “extremophile bacteria,” and then wonder if a different author again would start discussing the Cambrian Explosion and the unlikelihood of “evolution repeating itself,” but that’s a matter of “no longer paying attention to the actual story.”) However, before Freya can cut the story short through an apparent lack of purpose she’s got in trouble with members of the android aristocracy that owns most of the erstwhile servants of mankind, and before she managed to get a job with an interplanetary courier company (which gets to the end of the blurb), I just happened to have noticed I hadn’t got quite as far away as I might have thought I would from the less rigorous diversions I consume great quantities of these days.
The aristocrats are described as “bishojo” and “chibiform dwarfs”; later on there’s a description that concludes with “anime, not animated.” I’d already looked up the copyright date of 2008 and supposed “anime character designs” would be familiar enough by that point even to people who weren’t interested, or had outgrown it and moved on to something else, perhaps even something understood to be more thoughtful. I suppose I was also inclined to ponder the copyright date when comments about androids arguing about that religious belief of evolution cropped up, and did contemplate “ah yes, once upon a time the sort of thing that’s a skewed commentary on was a major ominous shadow on the future” (although it now might only be an ominous subfactor supporting the current threatening shadow). In any case, when Freya is modified to pass as an aristocrat as part of her new job I did wonder about bringing up “just think of yourself as being adapted to service a human with a ‘2D complex’”; if Stross did get around to mentioning something similar himself I didn’t manage to pick up on it.
That strange note aside, I did stay engaged with the actual story. There’s a rather small note on the cover about the novel being “a space opera,” but in the “no matter how hard you think actual space travel is, it’s harder than that” descriptions and Freya’s casual dislike of something humans were foolish enough to have believed they could survive I did get to pondering recent science fiction authors and how many of them have their own jaundiced views of something earlier authors injected into the larger culture. For all of that, the book’s outward journey in increasing leaps was more interesting than another invocation of “science beyond science” might be taken as, and there were plenty of narrow escapes along the way. There was also a certain amount of sex even for a “sexbot” without designed-for clients, if not explicit; near the end of the book things get more troubling that way, though.
With that warning given, the novel still impressed me with its sweep and ideas. Its conclusion was complicated to sort through, and I might not have put all of the pieces together along the way. That I did get through it at all still manages to matter a bit right now even so.