Saturn's Children

Saturn's Children is a science fiction novel by the British writer Charles Stross, published in 2008. Stross has described it as a space opera and a tribute to the late-period work of Robert A. Heinlein, particularly his 1982 novel Friday.

The story is set at some point in the twenty-third century, after humanity has died out and left behind a near-feudal android society spread across the Solar System. Wealthy and self-indulgent aristos own or have enslaved the greater part of the population, while the androids who remain free struggle to stay independent and can rarely afford the cost of travel between planets. Freya Nakamichi-47 is a robotic courtesan who was activated a century after the extinction of the species she was built to please, which makes her obsolete and leaves her working a series of menial jobs. After she offends one of the aristos she has to get off-world in a hurry, and the delivery she is offered, a sealed package to be carried from Mercury to Mars, is the only passage available to her.

The novel openly inhabits the conventions of the Heinlein juvenile and the picaresque, moving its heroine through one set of owners, travellers and antagonists after another while keeping the economics of a society without humans at the front of the story. Freya was designed to please a species that no longer exists, and the androids around her who have kept their freedom are still working out what independence is worth when there is nobody left to serve.