Review: Six Wakes

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 4-star review. That is an accurate description of my experience with this book.

I read this book as it was a finalist for this year's Hugo Awards. While it was very enjoyable, it only made it to third place on my ballot.

The premise of the book is a crew of 6 people that run an interstellar spaceship. It will take generations to get to the destination. The passengers are all packed away in a sort of hypersleep so they won't age during the trip.

The crew are all clones. In this fictional world, only one instance of a person can exist at one time. And if a person gets cloned, then they are not supposed to procreate. Essentially the bargain is that a clone can effectively live forever...once. The technology saves their memories from time to time so that if they die, their memories can be re-uploaded into a new clone and off they go.

The book deals heavily in the idea of what it means to be a person. It also leans into ethical issues such as genetic modifications and hacking of a person's brain (memories, personalities, etc.)

Each of the 6 crew members has a feature that makes them unique as a clone. The book does an excellent job of pacing as these features/histories are revealed.

The bones of the story is that the entire crew wakes up after being re-uploaded into new clones. Their most recent memories are from decades earlier. Yet they can clearly see that their prior clone bodies died in an orgy of violence. The question is...why? This turns into a bit of a murder/mystery as the characters go through a process of eliminating motivations and methods.

No spoilers,  but the ending really undermined all of the work that the author had done throughout the book. After all of the increasing tension and finger pointing, the crew decides to sit down and be nice....for reasons.  It was a good ending...but not a great one.


View all my reviews