Charles Stross: Saturn's Children (2008)

Edition: Orbit, 2009

What might happen if the human race became extinct in a couple of centuries time? In particular, what would robots, computers, and other intelligent machines left behind do? This question is basically the starting point for Stross' Hugo short listed novel. The central character of Saturn's Children is a particularly obsolete robot, designed as an escort - an intelligent sex toy - for the men who no longer exist. Freya Nakamichi-47 is scraping a living, her unfashiionable body shape an unwelcome reminder to other robots of a subservient past, when she accidentally kills a member of the new machine aristocracy and has to take a dangerous job to escape from Venus.

Apart from the basic idea - it's certainly ingenious to wonder about the fate of an intelligent sex toy when there's no one to sleep with - Stross taps into many familiar themes from the science fiction genre, with a twist each time. For example, this is really a coming of age story, a staple of the genre, but who ever heard of a coming of age story with a central character already two hundred years old? Or the space journey from Venus to Mercury, courtesy of a space pod with an irritating chirpy personality which functions by having sex with its passenger during the whole trip: it has to properly cocoon and pad the internal orifices of Freya's body, and why not make this as pleasurable as possible for both of them?

This is a novel that Robert Heinlein could have written, if hed been able to drop some of his prejudices and sexual obsessions. It has strong parallels with Friday, one of the best of his later novels. And this is not the only Heinlein novel which Stross either parallels or refers to in Saturn's Children. I noticed quick references to (short story) The Green Hills of Earth and The Number of the Beast, and I Will Fear No Evil, among others. Other writers have updated Heinlein, of course: John Barnes' Orbital Resonance is a particularly successful example. But Stross goes beyond just modernising one of the most famous science fiction authors. Heinlein was never particularly interested in robots; the artificial intelligences in his books are larger and fairly sessile: ship's computers, or the computers to run the services of a city. Thinking and writing about the design and built-in limitations of robot brains is distinctly Asimovian, Stross effectively updating the Three Laws of Robotics for today's readers. To bring together two such contrasting authors in this way is no mean feat.

Stross also has something to say about racism, servitue, identity, and theories of sociological evolution through this story. There is more to Saturn's Children than appears on the surface. Given these themes, it is not surprising that another novel he refers to is 1984.

Why the title? The reference is to Roman mythology (strictly speaking, Greek mythology as adopted by the Romans). Saturn, ruler of the Titans, bore a series of children by Rhea (not so co-incidentally the name of the first of Freya's robot model, from whom all their personalities are derived with a small amount of randomisation). When each child was born, Saturn swallowed them, because of a prophecy that one of them would overthrow him as ruler of the universe, as he had his own father. Eventually, Rhea deceived him, giving him a stone instead of a baby and bringing up Jupiter in secret, to eventually fulfil the prophecy. There is clearly a connection with the supplanting of humanity by their robot creations, as well as resonances between the personalities in the myth and the various bodies in the solar system named after them in a story which involves a lot of interplanetary travel.

The biggest problem with this edition is nothing to do with Charles Stross (at least, I hope he wasn't involved in the decision). At the back, there is something which has now become common in genre fiction, the excerpt from a new title, "if you enjoyed this book, you might like...". I am not a big fan of this in general, even when the excerpt is by the same author, and this is a particularly strange example. Michael Cobley''s Seeds of Earth seems from the chapter published here to come from a branch of the science fiction genre extremely remote from Saturn's Children, and I would judge it unlikely to appeal to the readers who enjoyed this: they might do, if they pick it up some other time, but the contrast between the two is jarring. Surely the point should be to encourage the reader to try it, not pick a random entry from the publisher's new releases which is more likely to put the reader of the excerpt off buying it. Perhaps in this case, the excerpt should have been accompanied by, "if you didn't think much of this novel, one you might prefer instead is...".

I was reading this - at home, not attending - during the 2009 WorldCon, Anticipation. So I was in the middle of Saturn's Children when the winners of this year's Hugo Awards were announced, including the best novel, the category for which it was short listed. Did it win? No. Did it deserve to win? I can't actually answer that, as I haven't yet read all the short listed novels. However, I did think it would have been a better choice than the actual winner, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. Good though that is, I felt that Saturn's Children has a lot more to say and is a bigger achievement. It renews some familiar, well loved, parts of the science fiction genre for the twenty first century. My rating: 8/10.

Charles Stross: Accelerando (2005)

Edition: Orbit, 2006

I first read Accelerando soon after it came out, but, although I found it fascinating, I wasn't able to put together a review. It's an incredibly ambitious novel, describing one potential fate of the human race: it aims to be as iconic a part of the science fiction genre as Neuromancer or Snow Crash. The novel is very much in their tradition of speculation about the interaction between computers, human minds, and the universe.


Accelerando follows three main characters, Manfred Macx and his daughter Amber, then her child Sirhan (not forgetting their cat, the most intelligent of all of them) as they explore the developments in computing which Stross suggests will occur during the twenty-first century and beyond. These begin with spectacles which provide a virtual reality overlay on the real world, to implanted computers and networked enhancements to memory and cognition, to the conversion of the solar system itself into a giant molecular computer, in which uploaded post-humans live in simulations. Manfred is pretty recognisable, just beyond the edge of the way that many people live now, with some interesting technological toys and a radical lifestyle (spent registering patents that he makes available for free use and living off favours from those who benefit from them). Amber is stranger, as most of her story takes place as a simulation on a tiny space ship/computer where she is empress over a virtual court based on fifteenth century France. Sirhan is an adolescent who experienced multiple simulated lifetimes as his education yet has not so far decided which gender to be.

While the themes are similar to those explored by Gibson and Stephenson, being a future based on the technology available at the time of writing, I suspect that Accelerando will not prove as influential. Both Neuromancer and Snow Crash proved self-fulfilling prophecies, Neuromancer inspiring developers of the Web and Snow Crash developers of virtual reality environments such as Second Life, the accuracy of their predictions coming as much from this as from authorial prescience. Both novels take place over a fairly short internal timescale, a few weeks during which the IT environment remains effectively static, and this means that they can really serve as models for developers to emulate. Accelerando, as its title indicates, is about the process of change, and this means that the worlds described in it are a moving target, and there is far less space for Stross to go into evocative details.

Apart from the IT, all three books have other things in common. Most obvious is that they all portray the current political realities based around nation states as effectively obsolete. This seemed very far fetched in the mid-eighties, when I first read Neuromancer's suggestion that corporate entities would be the main powers in the world (rather than running things from behind the scene, as has been suggested happened in Bush's America). Stross's post-capitalist world seems more likely now than it did when I first read Accelerando, before the credit crunch. The short sightedness of financial institutions and the consequent loss of trust by their customers, combined with a fairly clear and longstanding inability of governments to understand, legislate and innovate for the Internet seems to me to make the sort of changes that are the background to this novel not just possible but likely. Snow Crash, where the Mafia deliver pizza and Federal organisations are just an embarrassment is obviously satirical and not very likely in the real world; Stross's idea that the Russian Mafia enforce music copyright is less extreme while still satirical.

Any novel which covers three generations is ambitious, and Accelerando also describes a possible ultimate fate of the human race. From a futurological point of view, some aspects are questionable. The timetable, for example, depends on Moore's Law continuing to hold well into the future: it is not a natural law, just an observation, and depends on increasingly fast technological innovation which seems unlikely (at least in the current economic climate). The scenarios which are described in the novel are mostly well known speculation (in particular by Frank Tipler, who is indirectly mentioned through the "Tiplerite" religion, dedicated to bringing about his vision). Stross may well be the first science fiction author to produce a novel which centres around these ideas to this extent: novels dealing with the final destiny of humanity are surprisingly rare in science fiction, except when treated as satire. Accelerando does suffer from one of the major problems of science fiction which deals with big themes: when you have beings who are vastly more intelligent than any human (including the author and his readers), how is it possible to make their actions comprehensible? Stross does this mainly by keeping his narrative centred on those who remain close to baseline human, who stay recognisable to us, even if strange. (I'm not sure the people depicted at the end are quite strange enough, given how different they are to us; they should be more difficult for us to understand than our culture would be to someone from the nineteenth century, and I don't think that they are.)

Accelerando is fairly effective, and manages to remain sufficiently straightforward to be readable right to the end, despite the proliferation of virtual copies, clones and a wide variety of types of post-human with far greater intelligence than those who choose to remain principally flesh and blood, no matter how augmented. There are some lapses of judgement, such as the sudden adoption of an arch tone at the start of the final section. There is perhaps too much explanatory material. Each chapter has a section summarising the present situation, basically a summary of IT developments during a decade of the twenty first century. There is a lengthy, but amusing, FAQ for newly resurrected individuals given in full and taking several pages. And I always find a novel written in the present tense to be constantly mildly irritating. But, considering its ambition, Accelerando is very successful - 8/10.

Charles Stross: Glasshouse (2006)

Published: Orbit, 2006

Glasshouse (named from British army slang for a military prison) is basically a spy novel set in the future. The central character, Robin, starts the book recovering from memory surgery, a standard voluntary brainwashing technique which is part of psychiatric treatment: but he doesn't remember why he had memories removed, nor why the process was quite so drastic as it turned out to be. Then he is recruited for an experiment, in which he will live in a recreated environment from "the Dark Ages" (roughly, today) ostensibly to derive information and understanding lacking from the historical record (essentially because the knowledge required to understand our proprietary computer file formats has been lost). This sort of experiment has been done already: a famous attempt to get several families to live in a reconstructed Iron Age village in the late seventies was the earliest reality TV series I remember watching. When Robin wakes up in the experimental domain, he is no longer a man, but has been turned into a housewife in an environment distinctly reminiscent of the film Pleasantville. The undertones are even more sinister, as this isn't just a sitcom reflecting the attitudes of the fifties, but an experiment with a hidden purpose. This is made clear to Robin (or Reeve, as she is now known) when she realises that all the participants have been made fertile - this is normally a deliberate choice in their culture - and the aim appears to be to create a generation who know no other life than the experiment.

Using science fiction to satirise the attitudes of the present is hardly cutting edge science fiction. Even the use of time travel, re-enactment or simulation is common: it forms a major part of the film Star Trek IV, as well featuring in Pleasantville already mentioned. Other science fiction joins Stross in describing our age as psychotic or crazy (notably Robert Heinlein's Future History stories). Stross is at the edge end of this tendency in the genre, certainly more so than anything mentioned, but his writing here also contains much humour. (This is generally his writing style: dark but knowing.) The principal way in which Stross differs from many of the others who have satirised the present day in this way is that his future setting is very different from our own, even though the way in which it could have come about (apart from the unexplained cornucopia technology) is fairly believable as are continuing parallels with our own time (such as the detail that the cornucopia machines are subject to hacking and the equivalents of computer viruses) and people who are still recognisably human. To compare with Heinlein again, in his earlier works his future society is hardly distinguishable from that which he describes as crazy. Glasshouse also has a really good ending, after Reeve starts receiving messages that Robin had implanted deep into his subconscious before the memory surgery.

Glasshouse is publicised as a sequel to Accelerando, but this doesn't seem quite right to me. While dreaming of similar themes, much of the envisaged future here is different from that at the end of the earlier novel. It doesn't manage to be quite as interesting as Accelerando, which I feel is Stross' strongest work so far; nor is it as entertaining as the Merchant Princes series. However, it is still both interesting and enjoyable, and well worth reading.

Charles Stross: Iron Sunrise (2005)

Edition: Orbit, 2005
Review number: 1299

I was distinctly underwhelmed by Stross' debut, Singularity Sky, even if it did suggest the kernel of some ideas about a mathematical theory of causality that I have been working on, on and off, since I read it. It had enough interest for me to pick up his next novel the Hugo-nominated Iron Sunrise, and I am glad I did. From the very first page it is clear that this is written to a far higher and more individual standard: Charles Stross has found his own voice.

The story has elements which resonate with the history of the science fiction genre and with current events. Pulp fiction space opera is full of "planet busters" and ultimate weapons; in the Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith, perhaps the best known example, these include pairs of planets placed so that they crash into the enemy home world, and worlds of antimatter which reduce a world to a handful of gravel. The human element is so played down that it is barely present; the destruction of evil is much more important than the human suffering of the innocent (something which is a literary parallel to the behaviour of the British and American governments in Iraq, where civilian deaths were not even counted). A similar event, the "iron sunrise" of the title, is the centrepiece of Stross' novel: a supernova induced by a "weapon of mass destruction" that destroys the planet of Moscow. Stross makes the human cost of such a war crime apparent - the short suffering and death of the inhabitants of Moscow, and the more lengthy problems faced on one of Moscow's colonies - taking a much more adult stance than the glib heroics of Smith.

The setting is the imaginary future that Stross invented for Singularity Sky, and the same agent is the central character of Iron Sunrise. Indeed, the weakest aspect of Iron Sunrise is the repetition of the exposition of the background from the earlier novel - by memory, it seems to be made up from paragraphs pasted across almost verbatim, which is not just astoundingly lazy but which fills the early chapters of Iron Sunrise with the kind of clumsy "infodump" rightly derided by detractors of the science fiction genre. There are enough good things about Stross' writing that he really could (and should) have found a more subtle way to do this (particularly since any readers of the earlier novel would know this); even an introduction describing Singularity Sky would have been better.

The infodump and super-weapons are not the only science fiction clichés to appear in Iron Sunrise. There is the independent adolescent of above average intelligence, a staple of the genre since the early days of Robert Heinlein (and one of the main reasons why science fiction fandom is associated with geeky teenagers). In this case, she is named Wednesday, in what is presumably a slightly quirky nod to Charles Addams, and she is one of the refugees from the Moscovite colony already mentioned. Then there are the apparent villains, those who are suggested to be the destroyers of Moscow: the ReMastered, who bear a strong resemblance to the T'leilaxu in Frank Herbert's Dune novels, or to any other science fictional elite who control the proletariat via conditioning: puppetmasters in a lineage going back to the dystopias of Orwell and Huxley. All of these, including the planetary destruction, are far better handled than the infodump, which is sufficiently poor and comes early enough in the novel to seriously impair the chances Iron Sunrise has of winning the Hugo. The nomination is in my opinion deserved - it is, after all, good enough to make me consider re-reading Singularity Sky.

Charles Stross: Singularity Sky (2003)

Edition: Orbit, 2004
Review number: 1276

There are several science fiction writers who are particularly fashionable at the moment and whose novels have a fair amount in common. The authors I have in mind include Ken MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, Richard Morgan and, pre-eminently, Iain M. Banks. With his first novel, Charles Stross makes a clear bid to add his name to this list. The familiar elements are all here - the post-modern ironic take on traditional space opera clichés, an interest in philosophical ideas (in this case artificial intelligence and time travel), a smattering of references to classic genre stories, the construction of post-capitalist economic and political systems. To me, though, it doesn't quite gel together to become as convincing as the writing of any of the writers I've mentioned.

The background to Singularity Sky is the emergence of a powerful artificial intelligence in the telephone networks of twenty first century Earth; in an event known as the Singularity, the Eschaton basically becomes a godlike figure, transporting nine tenths of the human population to distant planets instantaneously and leaving behind new technologies such as the cornucopia machines, capable of recreating any object and so rendering all economics up to that point null and void.

Several centuries later, the resulting chaos has stabilised, leaving the Earth with an anarchic society in which the only cohesive entity is the United Nations. Elsewhere, in one colony known as the New Republic, the solution to the problem posed by the cornucopia machines has been to create a society apparently modelled on Tsarist Russia in which such technology is strictly prohibited. On one of their outlying planets, a space travelling object - a self replicating machine called the Festival, not in itself intelligent - arrives in orbit, and drops a large number of mobile phones which offer to grant wishes in exchange for information in the form of stories. The New Republic leaders cannot conceive of this type of entity, and assume that this is an invasion from some interstellar power that they didn't previously know of (and in terms of the disruption to the state's power structures, the arrival of the Festival has a similar effect to an attack, so this is not as strange a misconception as it sounds).

This idea seems like a reasonable basis for a story, but the elements never seem to come together. (For me, at least - Charles Stross has plenty of fans). The problem is the writing style; while Banks, Reynolds and Morgan all produce prose which draws the reader in and is full of atmosphere, much of Singularity Sky is dull and leaden. The best bits are the references to other writers; I particularly liked the high-tech version of the Luggage from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. It is nearly not enough - the idea is sufficiently interesting that I wanted to find out the ending, but the temptation to leave out the intervening pages and skip to the last few was strong.

The characters too are a bit of a problem. Some come from the backward feudal New Republic, while others are products of the post-capitalist Earth - and yet they both come across as pretty similar, late twentieth century humans. Even the beings who hitchhike with the Festival, some of which are described as extremely alien, have human characters, by and large. A group of intelligent burrowing animals, for example, are far less convincingly non-human than the rabbits in Watership Down.

This is a novel likely to confirm readers who are not fans of the science fiction genre of the stereotypical view of it that puts them off: strong on ideas, weak on execution, particularly poor in style and characterisation.