Latest in my set of Hugo nominees for this year (and Anathem is sitting accusingly on the bookshelf, while I’ve ordered the paperback of Zoe’s Tale for when it comes out later this month). Lots of good stuff here, with the setting a solar system where the robots have taken over after the extinction of humanity, and our narrator a sexbot designed to pleasure a race which no longer exists, dragged into espionage. Charlie gets significant points for insisting on the vast distances within the solar system, especially once you get out as far as Jupiter, never mind the Kuiper Belt.

He even came close to over-riding my general distaste for stories about cute (indeed, in this case, very sexy) anthropomorphic robots, with a decent ratiionalisation for their shape – the robots here are actually designed for functionality rather than anthropomorphism, and with sexbots the one implies the other. The prose is typically fastpaced and I’m afraid lost me a couple of times. Still, great fun as ever.