This is somewhere in length between a novella and a novel. Despite being sold as a standalone, it forms part of the so-called Sunflower cycle which I failed to realize for some time and might be difficult to understand on its own. Conveniently one of my favorite stories from the Reach for Infinity anthology that I read only a few months ago is part of this series. The other two are readily available online. Since this book leaves many questions unanswered even at the end, reading those other stories helps quite a bit.
Sunday Ahzmundin is the narrator and protagonist of this story. He is one of a crew of some 30,000 humans on board the Eriophora, a massive starship carved out of an asteroid. Their mission is to construct a network of wormhole gates across the galaxy and as the story opens they have been at it for tens of millions of years already. This is possible because the Eriophora is controlled mainly by its AI, nicknamed the Chimp. The human crew are kept in suspended animation most of the time and are awakened in small numbers for only hours or days at a time when their expertise is required. Sunday is one of the Chimp’s favorites, being awakened more often that the norm for how well she gets along with other crew members, effectively acting as a kind of spokesperson or community manager. As the mission drags with no end in sight, many of the crew members become restless and dissatisfied. Things come to a head when they suspect the Chimp of secretly murdering many of them in their sleep when they have outlived their usefulness to the mission and a mutiny that plays out across millions of real-time years is organized.
As usual for Watts, this is hard science-fiction at its finest. The worldbuilding is fantastic, the science is solid and plausible, and the scale of the story is vaster than the mind can encapsulate. The descriptions of the Eriophora, with a harnessed black hole in its core, how it contains multiple bioengineered forests to sustain a closed ecosystem, its fleet of robots that it sends on ahead of it to collect raw materials and build everything, all are details that are sure to please science-fiction fans. The most interesting bits here are that given the open-ended nature of the mission, the designers had to come up with ways to ensure that the ship survives and remains committed to the objectives across geological time scales. The measures taken include selecting and engineered organisms for the ecosystem that would only mutate minimally, storing data in massive, inert crystals, and of course even the practice of keeping that large of a pool of human crew members and keeping that frozen most of the time is a way of ensuring continuity. Actually the technology involved in that last part is one of the least realistic parts of the story. Across time scales of hundreds of thousands of years, even simple data storage on physically tough materials would be challenging yet they somehow have the technology to freeze humans for so long and have them wake up as mostly themselves as needed.
The main plot unfortunately is less interesting. Sunday starts out as an ally of the Chimp and takes time to come around to the side of the mutineers. Then there’s some fun stuff as the revolution takes place very, very slowly as the conspirators leave secret messages for one another all over the ship as so few of them are awake at a time. The most interesting part of this is that the Chimp is dumb by design, having fewer synapses than a human, as a way to ensure that its goals would not diverge away from the mission. But it does have full control of the ship including near complete surveillance so the mutineers have to move carefully. That part of the plot is solid but it’s not anything outstanding. By contrast, I am far more intrigued by the hints of other things going on, such as what has happened to Earth in the intervening time and the strange monsters that occasionally emerge from the gates they build. Then there’s the discovery they make that an unusual course drift isn’t caused by them being off-course but by the universe itself moving. Unfortunately none of these questions are resolved in this novella and will likely be covered in future stories from Watts.
By the end of this book, Sunday is convinced that the Chimp has a secret ally of some kind that helps him understand the psychology of the human crew. In fact two of the other stories in the Sunflower cycle are set after this book and in one of them Sunday seems certain that this was an anti-mutiny measure that the original mission planners created long ago. This is of course a terrible spoiler but I find myself not caring much because while I love Watts’ ideas, I have become very frustrated by how stingy he is with critical information such as this fact and how he leaves holes in his stories that might be filled in later or not at all. Another of his tricks is that he has his characters guess, theorize, speculate and so on but he never offers the reader any solid reassurances if they were right or not. Of course, if they’re not, he would have just wasted a lot of verbiage for nothing so we’re obviously meant to take them as being true, at least as far as the characters know. But after seeing him use this time and again across so many books, I really want to convey how fed up I am that there never seems to be any solid ground underneath all that wild guessing.
As a standalone story, I don’t think The Freeze-Frame Revolution is all that great. However it does form an essential component of the Sunflower cycle and I love the premise and the other stories in it. By far the best story is The Island which also features Sunday and the main character and is set long after the events in this book. I would consider it one of the best science-fiction stories I’ve read in recent years. So paying it for this is well worth it especially when Watts is so generous about making the other stories available for reading for free. Similarly I have no hope that Watts will ever provide the reader with any definitive answers for anything in the worlds he builds. But I am hopelessly addicted to the questions he raises and I concede that he is one of the best hard science-fiction writers currently working in the field.