2024 Canon Promo Post

[keita52]

Use the comments of this post to promote your favorite canon(s). Please use one comment per canon. You can use the template provided here or whatever format you wish.

If it is freely available online, consider adding it to the Freely Available Canons spreadsheet.



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[zabbers]

Name: Saturn’s Children (2008)
Author: Charles Stross
Length: a long novel (there’s a sequel and a bridging short story, but they’re very different)
Sub-genre: science fiction space opera
Why I like about it/what it’s about: Freya Nakamichi-47 is a robot whose line was created to love and please humans, but she wasn’t instantiated until long after all humans had gone extinct. Meanwhile, the artificial lifeforms created by humans, mostly to help them colonize space, have developed a thriving society, full of technology and social structures extrapolated from the initial conditions that the humans set them. They’ve got much more robust bodies of any shapes and sizes that are useful to them as spacefaring robots, but personalities templated on human psychology. They’re able to share programming, personality, and memories, especially with “sibs” from the same line. Lots of interesting questions of personhood, agency, purpose, personal identity, and memory. Detailed, thoughtful technological worldbuilding (for instance, they don’t have FTL travel, but they are very long-lived, more radiation resistant than we are, and able to alter their perception of time so, unlike their “pink goo” creators, they can at least get through slow interplanetary/interstellar travel).
Any other important information to know about: It’s not an equal society—there are “aristos”, robot lines who were in position to take over early in the time after the extinction of humans; “arbeiters”, indentured individuals with limited/no free will under control of other robots or their original programming; Freya comes up against her own programming and design as a “courtesan”/sexbot (for instance, she’s made so that if anyone is attracted to her, she’s automatically attracted back), and her line suffers from depression that might stem from obsolescence and the impossibility of fulfilling their purpose or possibly from some developmental trauma during training/conditioning.