If nothing else, my experiment in reading Charles Stross for the first time resulted in one of the most unique reading experiences I’ve had in the last couple of years.
This book was somewhat of an impulse read. I wanted to read Stross’s Neptune’s Brood, because it was one of the few Hugo noms I hadn’t read yet, but noticed it was the second in a series. All the reviews said you didn’t need to read the first one, but I’m me, and I have to do things in order or my brain will explode and I will die. So I picked this up from the library because it was there when I went to pick up Skin Game . . . and, well . . .
So, you know how they say never to judge a book by its cover? This book is, like, the epitome of that cliched phrase. It’s what that cliche was invented for. Because honestly? I think most of the time that phrase is shit. I judge books by their covers ALL THE TIME. And you know what? I am REALLY REALLY GOOD at picking out books that I end up liking. Covers are definitely a factor that I consider (though by no means are they the only factor). There are definitely books I’ve loved that have horrible covers, but they are the exception, not the rule. And the thing about Saturn’s Children isn’t even that it’s a bad cover (in the sense that the artwork quality is poor), just an extraordinarily ill-chosen one:
The first edition of @cstross‘s SATURN’S CHILDREN has the porniest cover. I was getting the DIRTIEST looks while reading in public today.
— Ashley (@narfna) May 23, 2014
I’m assuming this is a complaint he receives often, as he replied to me with this link to his blog. And I get it. I even think the cover makes sense in context, although I also think it’s probably somewhat of a cheap ploy on the part of the publishers. And a certain kind of reader is very much going to be drawn to this book, either because they want to read naughty fiction, or because (like me) they’re going to go WHAT THE HELL? and then get really, really curious about what that book could possibly contain. But most people? Uh, they’re going to get the wrong idea. I have a strong feeling that this cover probably turned away more potential readers than it brought in, but that’s just my opinion.
So why does the cover make sense in context? Well, because the main character is a sexbot. Or rather, a femmebot. Anyway, she’s an artificially intelligent robot, and she and her lineage sisters were designed to please a race of beings that went extinct soon after she was created. That’s right, Freya (our heroine) is a sexbot without anyone to have sex with. Her very purpose for existing is dead and gone. And with Freya and her sisters, it’s not just about sex. They are also programmed to love their creators uncontrollably, to the point of losing their minds and their free will. But Freya and her sisters, though their slavery is the most obvious, are not the only robots to depend on humans. All robots are programmed to be subserviant to human kind. In the absence of humans, however, robot class itself has stratified, with certain ‘high class’ robots rising up to be ‘aristos,’ dominating over their fellow robots with money, power, and in some cases, slave chips.
While I found large parts of this engaging, even bizarrely humorous, a lot of the time I was simply frustrated, due to the way Stross structured his narrative. The biggest problem, I think, was the passive narrator, Freya. Her story is told in the first person, and as immediately engaging as this was, it was equally problematic. Freya spends most of the book almost as confused as the reader (I say almost, because at least Freya has the rather large advantage of knowing the way her own world works — we as readers have to sort that out, as well as what the hell else is going on). The whole book, we follow Freya as she goes from one place to another, often on very long and arduous space journeys, given missions by one boss or another, and only getting trickles of information at a time. She barely makes any decisions for herself, and doesn’t engage in self-analysis (or much of any other kind of analysis) until the end of the book. Now, I recognize that her behavior is part of the criticism of slavery, that she has been trained by her social system to passively accept life around her and follow orders, but that doesn’t make reading about her story in this fashion any less frustrating (or confusing, as Stross chose to add espionage plots on top of the rest of it). It’s basically a clusterfuck of confusion, at least until the end, and even then I’m still not entirely sure I understood it all.
Sci-fi as a genre is fixated on ideas, and Stross excels at that. His plots and characters illuminate the issues of slavery, economy, identity, and the stagnation that results in interesting ways. His worldbuilding is also excellent–the robot society he imagined is vivid, and spread across the solar system. His universe feels lived in and plausible (brief flashes of dirt and humor make it more so). Even the fact that the robots have sex (and they have a lot of it) lends an extra dimension of reality to his fictional world. And the idea of examining a post-human world (in which one of the objectives of the robots is actually to resurrect humanity) is a brilliant one. But great sci-fi doesn’t just have ideas, it has ideas and great characters. It’s in that respect that I think this book is lacking. Freya makes for an easy and interesting point of view in this world, but she herself is an empty vessel.
Anyway, despite the issues I had with it, the flashes of brilliance I saw in it were enough that I will definitely be reading more of Stross’s stuff in the future.
