One of my favorite SF books all year. Innovative idea for a setting, but still taking some familiar tropes and doing something unusual with them. The writing was well done, the pace kept me wanting to read, and the characters were full. A few twists and an unraveling mystery made the plot fun and unpredictable.
Nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel 201, it could have easily won either, in my opinion.
The time is far in the future, and cloning and other technologies have advanced enough that people can have new bodies grown and all the info from the old brain dumped into the new. As you might imagine this creates many fascinating social and economic scenarios—not all of them good. Lafferty occasionally jumps back in time, before the starship left, to give us a little backstory on each character. While some have seen this as unnecessary, it provides a break from the intense mystery, offers more insight into each character (without giving too much away), and sets the tone of this brave new world of clones. Well done!
Maria wakes up in a cloning vat with no memory of her last moments or how she died. There are seven other vats, filled with the rest of the crew of a starship heading to colonize a planet. The hold is full of thousands of people in stasis, ready to be poured into new clones when they arrive. As the other crew members come alive in their vats, none have a memory of anything beyond just after they boarded and left Earth. Yet it has been decades. As they explore the ship, they find that someone had attacked and killed their previous bodies. But who? Even the killer wouldn’t remember, because their most recent memories were not downloaded to the new bodies.
In essence, this is a brilliant murder mystery set in space, with its uniqueness coming from the technology available, not the least of which is a killer who cannot possibly know he or she is the killer! But my favorite part was how Lafferty’s novel allows the reader to be confused along with the characters, slowing revealing clues and evidence. I felt like I was right there with the characters—maybe even a step behind them—trying to figure out what happened.
Even if you are not a big science fiction fan, if you like books (or movies) such as Jurassic Park, you’ll enjoy this.
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