Saturn's Children
Sometime in the twenty-third century, humanity went extinct—leaving only androids behind. Freya Nakamichi 47 is a femmebot, one of the last of her kind still functioning. With no humans left to pay for the pleasures she provides, she agrees to transport a mysterious package from Mercury to Mars. Unfortunately for Freya, she has just made herself a moving target for some very powerful, very determined humanoids who will stop at nothing to possess the contents of the package.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
38mentions
31people
2012–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > AI forces us to confront an issue that's often come up in science fiction - when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient?
One of the series that I think is most interesting on that topic is the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's an awkward read, but it has the most interesting other minds that I've encountered in sci-fi.
Another one that I'd put on there specifically about AI is The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts... which I can't say much more without it being a spoiler one way or another.
> Maybe that's the fate of humans. No big extinction. Just the demographic transition, a birth rate below replacement rate, for a few centuries.
https://www.bohemiandrive.com/npwil - Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life (not a spoiler, that's chapter 1, panelset 2). Saturn's Children by Charles Stross might also be appropriate (It's an especially odd book to read immediately after Friday - the "I recognize that twist... oh, it twisted ... that way?").
- Echoing others, Reynolds (House of Suns, Pushing Ice, the Revelation Space series), Stross (Accelerando, Glasshouse, and Saturn's Children/Neptune's Brood are my favorites), and Rajaniemi (the Quantum Thief trilogy) scratch roughly the same itch for me.
- My favourite Stross books are "Saturn's Children", "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise" in that order, to name some of his other books. "Neptune's Breed" is the sequel to "Saturn's Children". For "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise", I really enjoyed the concept of an AI that seeks to prevent the use of time travel to change history, by using secret agents that are distributed between multiple star systems.
- You should read Accelerando and the Saturn's Children books by Charles Stross if autonomous corporate structures are your thing.
- One way interstellar colonies could finance themselves, including no-faster-than-light financial systems is explored in Charles Stross' Saturn's Children books.
Also it has space accountancy pirates.
- There is so much to love about this book. I read it twice, back to back. It's probably one of the more concept-dense books you'll read from the period, but unlike lots of scifi lit stross wrote a very solid story that's worth reading in it's own right.
Another good book by Stross that doesn't get much love is Saturn's Children. it has the same inventivness and story-telling prowess. the most outrageous elements of the story are the very glue that make the whole thing more tractable.
