Saturn's Children

I'm sure I've said enough about Stross in my previous posts, and if you've read any you'll have a flavour of my fanboy-ish regard for his work.

Saturn's Children travels in a different direction from his other works. Rather than a singularity style universe of unlimited potential technological advancement, Saturn's Children is a world where humanity's robotic servants have been left in charge of the Solar System, after humanity rendered itself extinct. The robots, however, were built to serve humanity, so the society they build is warped and missing its core function.

The premise is that humans never worked out AI properly - they were only able to imprint human minds onto robot brains - which means the characters act and react in believably human ways to the events that unfold. It's a great story, and operates on two levels (like much of Stross's work); a story about believable people in believable situations, as well as a gigantic what-if question that looks at what might happen if we ever develop sufficiently intelligent robotic servants.

Overall, a good book, though perhaps not as mind-blowing as some of his other work, if simply because the scale is that much smaller.