Charles Stross is a unique voice among today’s wave of “New British SF” writers, but he also knows his history. Saturn’s Children is dedicated to old lions Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, and the ghosts of both (especially Heinlein) can be felt in the latest effort. Reviews of the novel vary wildly, which may suggest as much about the tastes of particular
Bob Howard is a computer-hacker desk jockey, who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic. But for some reason, he is.
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Arthur heads back to the earth he knows and loves, hitching in spacecrafts and then in a car with an exquisitely beautiful unconscious girl and her git of a brother. Meanwhile, Ford is in a space bar with a bad rep trying to pay for an entire bar tab using American Express... which no one in the known universe accepts. He, too, soon discovers the re-existence of Earth and wonders if Arthur knows.
“He was clinically dead after the accident – but was miraculously revived. Now Hatch Harrison and his wife approach each day with a new appreciation for life. But something has come back with Hatch from the other side. A terrible presence that links his mind to a psychotic’s, so that a force of murderous rage courses through him.”
Her father is Arthur Dent, her mother, unexpectedly to all concerned is Trillian, her godless godfather is Ford Perfect. Through a complicated series of misunderstandings at the naming ceremony she is named at random, or "Random" for short. When Random sets out across the galaxy to find out the truth about her vanished mother, her journey takes her to an utterly insignificant and little blue-green planet whose only entry in the guide reads, "Mostly harmless...."
