Six people wake up floating in the middle of a gory crime scene. They are naked, newborn in adult bodies.
This makes more sense when you consider that all six are clones, the skeleton crew of an interstellar colony ship whose flight path would far outstrip any individual life. And they've been chosen as the crew because they have criminal records back on Earth, laboring for their freedom in a process with deep historical echoes. The ship's artificial intelligence has been crippled, along with its gravity. They are all missing 25 years.
The above is the premise of Mur Lafferty's novel Six Wakes. Some of the assumptions therein are challenged as the book goes on. It's clever and sneaky that way.
It's also old-fashioned, in what I'd say is a good way. Lafferty doesn't bend over backwards to be immersive about her world. The plot is strange enough, the characters are vivid. The world has changed in the centuries between our time and theirs, but this comes out at its own pace. In other respects, Lafferty appears satisfied to let you imagine things are like the present or recent past. That keeps her from getting bogged down in excessive detail.
There are recent influences. In an afterword Lafferty cites the video game FTL: Faster Than Light. Also the TV series Orphan Black and Lost, the latter for its core gimmick of running extensive flashbacks at an inflection point for the character depicted in them. The prose, though, is of older craftsmanship.
This makes more sense when you consider that all six are clones, the skeleton crew of an interstellar colony ship whose flight path would far outstrip any individual life. And they've been chosen as the crew because they have criminal records back on Earth, laboring for their freedom in a process with deep historical echoes. The ship's artificial intelligence has been crippled, along with its gravity. They are all missing 25 years.
The above is the premise of Mur Lafferty's novel Six Wakes. Some of the assumptions therein are challenged as the book goes on. It's clever and sneaky that way.
It's also old-fashioned, in what I'd say is a good way. Lafferty doesn't bend over backwards to be immersive about her world. The plot is strange enough, the characters are vivid. The world has changed in the centuries between our time and theirs, but this comes out at its own pace. In other respects, Lafferty appears satisfied to let you imagine things are like the present or recent past. That keeps her from getting bogged down in excessive detail.
There are recent influences. In an afterword Lafferty cites the video game FTL: Faster Than Light. Also the TV series Orphan Black and Lost, the latter for its core gimmick of running extensive flashbacks at an inflection point for the character depicted in them. The prose, though, is of older craftsmanship.
2 comments:
Your review of this one interests me enough that I may have to get a copy once the bookcases have been arranged in their new home. You know I really enjoy science fiction novels and mysteries too so when the two are well combined I'm bound to be entertained. This one sounds good.
There are a couple of others I've read and enjoyed that feature clones. The first I thought of was House of Suns by Alaistair Reynolds, the other being Kiln People by David Brin. They're pretty different from one another but both are cleverly done books.
The other one I thought of that's one of the scarier sci-fi concepts I've come across was Peter Hamilton's Pandora's Star - a mystery about clones of a non-human kind. While Hamilton isn't the most literate author I've ever read his story concepts are very unique and he writes with great energy and enthusiasm.
I do think you might really like this one. The characters don't take too long in growing on you. Of course none of them have their hands clean. But, well, that's people for you.
And thank you for giving me a few suggestions as to what to read in the near future. I'm curious as to what the non-human clones in Pandora's Star are like. But the one that really piques my curiosity is the Alastair Reynolds book. (Surprised to find on Wikipedia that he's Welsh. That sounds so much like a Scottish name.) 6 million years in the future is so distant from what any of us can expect to see that it exists in the realm of mythology or allegory.
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