The Errant Æsthete

“Today is the two hundredth anniversary of the final extinction
of my One True Love, as close as I can date it. I am drunk on
battery acid and wearing my best party frock,
sitting on a balcony beneath a pleasure palace
afloat in the stratosphere of Venus.
My feet dangle over a slippery-slick rain gutter as I peek
over the edge: Thirty kilometers below my heels,
the metal-snowed foothills of Maxwell Montes glow red-hot.
I am thinking about jumping. At least I’ll make a pretty corpse,
I tell myselves. Until I melt.”

This excerpt from femmebot Freya Nakamichi 47, the heroine of Charles Stross’s exciting new novel Saturn’s Children, takes place sometime in the twenty third century when humanity went extinct, leaving only androids behind.