It's a way better book than Neptune's Brood. Totally fascinating. The idea is that human beings have died out, but that robot society is still organizing itself within the parameters that the humans left behind. Thus, robots are only free if they've established corporations to buy themselves. The government is extremely anarchic because robots can't legally vote in any of the defunct nations that humans have left behind. And robots have this strange love/hate relationship with their own freedom, wherein they want to be free (because they're built in humanity's image) but also want to find some other robot to serve (because they've all been built with a purpose in mind and now they feel a bit useless). Am liking it a lot. I wonder if this augurs a new phase of science-fiction reading in my life.