Saturn's Children (Stross novel)

Saturn's Children  

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author(s) Charles Stross
Country UK & US
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction
Publisher Orbit (UK), Ace (US)
Publication date July 1, 2008
Media type Print (Hardcover)
Pages 336 pp
ISBN 0-441-01594-8
OCLC Number 202548412
Dewey Decimal 823/.92 22
LC Classification PR6119.T79 S28 2008

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"[1] (specifically Heinlein's Friday[2]). It was nominated for the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novel [3], and was a finalist for the 2009 Prometheus Award.

The novel describes the travels and perils of Freya Nakamichi-47, a 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 extinction of the human race, 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 Heinlein's novel Friday: the protagonist is an artificial woman, designed and trained to make love to men or kill them; she travels extensively at the bidding of a mysterious "Boss", and impersonates an aristocrat traveling on a spaceship as part of a mission and has a relationship to a man named "Pete". Even her name hints at Heinlein's novel, and she is actually called "Friday" at one point, likely as a joke.

Saturn's Children is believed to be the first work of fiction to include the dwarf planet Eris as a setting.

Footnotes