This was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards though it ended up winning neither of them. I was intrigued by a Broken Forum member describing its premise as a science-fiction mystery novel. Unfortunately the premise is the best thing about the novel. Though author Mur Lafferty sets up the mystery beautifully, the way it plays out wasn’t satisfying to me as the plot revolves around a single malefactor whose identity can easily be predicted by the reader but is pieced together by the characters only at the end of the novel.

Aboard the generation starship Dormire, its six crew members are revived in cloning bay. The corpses and copious blood splattered around the bay show clearly enough why they had to be resurrected. A terrible mass murder has just happened. However each crew member possesses only the memories from shortly after they embarked onto the ship and it is evident that the corpses before them are aged. In fact, a simple check reveals that they are two and half decades into their mission. They also discover that the AI running the ship is out of order and without it they have no access to the logs recording what had happened. Each of them know that there is at least one murderer on the ship but it could be anyone even they themselves as they have no memories of life on the ship. With tempers flaring and the pressure mounting, they also find that the ship has gone off course, that the only source of food onboard, a sort of food printer has been programmed to only produce poison and that the ship’s pilot was not murdered but apparently hanged himself in the cockpit.

I think that everyone can agree that the above makes for a great start to any novel and I love how the opening chapters, beginning with technician Maria being decanted as a newly created clone, capture the horror and confusion that they all wake up to. There’s plenty of newfangled technology to grapple but it’s easy enough to grasp what is available from the context without any clumsy exposition. It’s easy enough to realize that humans can extend their lifespans using clones and they can record mindmaps to transfer their memories to the new bodies. The novel also provides a summary of the laws that govern the use of this technology in a manner that is clearly meant to evoke Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. The upshot is that only one copy of a person is allowed to exist at a time and that if more than one copy is made, the newer clone is deemed to be the one to have the legal right to exist. Naturally solving the mystery isn’t so simple as its root lie in the identity of each of the crew members and so there are plenty of flashback scenes. It turns out that some of these characters have lived for a very long time indeed and were even involved in the circumstances that led to the current laws.

To this mix however we need to add one more piece of technology: a select few of the truly skilled are able to hack these mindmaps to remove or add memories and alter a personality wholesale. At first this ability is believed to be vanishingly rare but later a character reveals this skill and it gets a little silly how casually it is used. I don’t think that the author gives this technology quite the narrative weight that it deserves as its implications on the sense of self and identity far outweigh that of cloning which the author spends much more time examining. I also think that it serves as a sort of deux ex machina and its inclusion invalidates the various characters’ backstories. What they have done or thought or felt throughout their long lives suddenly doesn’t seem very important any longer when it can all be rewritten anyway. I’m stumped that the author believes that killing a personality by erasing a mindmap is viewed as being less serious than editing it. I would think the latter is a much more serious violation of the self.

In addition to the unconvincing attempts to philosophize, the writing quality is only mediocre and the pacing is downright bad. Though the characters are all very different their long lives gives them a sort of samey-ness and they all snap and hiss at each other in similar ways to artificially increase the tension and create conflict. I think there is something structurally wrong with the novel too as the main person responsible for everything turns out to not even be on the ship. The primary motive for the conspiracy is also stupid. Once you realize that it is possible to edit mindmaps, you can torture and hurt people in all sorts of fun ways and their being effectively immortal would only prolong the agony.

So yeah while I loved the premise and was very enthusiastic when I started reading this, I don’t like the execution at all. The plot isn’t half as clever as the author seems to think it is and all of the time spent talking about the laws passed to govern cloning feel wasted as they’re not relevant on the ship. It really feels as if the author started with a great idea but flailed a bit at bringing it to fruition. It’s entertaining enough I suppose but it’s no novel of the year.