Category Archives: Space

I suppose eroticism has always been a part of science fiction, at least in the cover art, though I don’t recall any as explicit as this tale, where a femmebot created to serve humanity’s sexual needs is left to look for love in all the wrong places because humanity has long been extinct. Extinct by it’s own hand, in fact, not through war or environmental disaster, but through selfish unwillingness to replicate–life with pets, instead, and all those forty-two-inch flat-screen boob tubes, I suppose.

I’ve now read three of Stross’s works, this one, Halting State and Singularity Sky. While I enjoyed HS, which is more about the Internet’s future than robotics, and SS had its moments, Saturn’s Children was the most memorable. Not only, or even especially because of the eroticism, but because of the suprisingly bleak assessment of what life beyond Earth really would be like for "pink goo," us, in landscapes and interplanetary propulsion systems awash in deadly radiation where only robots with replaceable parts can thrive.