The Butt Ugly Weblog

Saturn's children

Ever since I got the Kindle, I've started reading a lot more books. The Kindle store is just too handy, and the fact that you can just send yourself ten samples, read them through, and then just pick the one that looks most interesting, is really, really useful. However, there are still just too many books to read (and time is scarce), so I've started to simply go through all the Hugo/Nebula nominees of the years past. (I liked Ian McDonald's River of Gods, though it was a hard read.)

I just finished reading Charles Stross's Saturn's Children, a story of a sexbot designed to entertain humans, living in an universe where all the humans have died. It gets a lot weirder than that, but what I find really interesting is how the book is one of those rare books that really reads like an action movie. It's a pageturner in the Dan Brown sense, and even though it's a most unfashionable thing to say, I think that's a good thing.

I'm so expecting a summer movie out of this one. Robots, sex and conspiracies, with none of your average scifi philosophy about humanity and their relationships in the stars - how's that not interesting? We're all dead, we did it to ourselves, but we forgot to turn off the robots when we left. It's the summer action film of the scifi book variety :-)