Six Wakes | Goobergunch's Library | TinyCat |

2024-04-29 3:37 am

Six Wakes

by Mur Lafferty

Other authorsKirk Benshoff (Cover designer)

Paperback, 2017-01

Status

Available

Call number

PS3612 .A3743

Tags

American literature, first edition, Hugo finalist, Nebula nominee, science fiction, signed

Genres

Science Fiction

Science Fiction

Publication

Orbit (New York, 2017). 1st edition, 1st printing. 400 pages. $15.99.

Description

"A space adventure set on a lone ship where the clones of a murdered crew must find their murderer -- before they kill again. It was not common to awaken in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood. At least, Maria Arena had never experienced it. She had no memory of how she died. That was also new; before, when she had awakened as a new clone, her first memory was of how she died. Maria's vat was in the front of six vats, each one holding the clone of a crew member of the starship Dormire, each clone waiting for its previous incarnation to die so it could awaken. And Maria wasn't the only one to die recently..."--

Media reviews

In the end, Six Wakes is a very impressive novel. I found myself fully invested in the characters and carried along by the powerful pull of the plot as the tension ratcheted up towards the climax. There might be more stories to tell of these characters or the “world” they inhabit, but this was

an excellent standalone SF thriller.

— 1 more

National Public Radio (NPR)

Like Asimov's work, Six Wakes offers a set of science-fictional rules that, of course, are going to be bent, broken, and tested throughout the story. Ethical and philosophical dilemmas abound, from the definition of the individual to the nature of identity. Rather than posing them abstractly,

Lafferty tethers these big quandaries to an exquisitely wound plot, one that shifts from whodunit to howdunit to whydunit with a breathless sense of escalation.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Unkletom

This is a genre-bending tale set on a space ship that begins with six clones waking up in space to find that someone has murdered the entire crew. The clones begin life with the adult body of the crew member they were cultured to replace but they only have their memories prior to the launch, which

appears to have taken place about twenty years before. In this scenario, each clone is stuck on the ship with a murderer who, for all they know, could turn out to be themselves. The dialog may be a little clunky but I loved the plot. Brilliant idea!

LibraryThing member jdifelice

I really, really, really enjoyed this sci-fi, mystery thriller. The characters were really well done with some great back story and development. The world was also really cool, in the micro, and macro of this world and how things have evolved on Earth and the Moon.

The writing was very compelling,

and I will definitely be finding more books to read from this author.

4.5/5 stars

LibraryThing member clamairy

It was mostly a fun distracting read. I did enjoy the arguments & discussions on the ethics of cloning and gene tweaking, and whether cloned humans have souls. My main quibbles had to do with the science & SciFi bits. I can't understand why the author went to all of the trouble to set the book four

centuries in the future, dream up and write about mind mapping technology & organic body printing capabilities, and then had the crew fighting with knives & guns.

LibraryThing member sturlington

A locked-room mystery that takes place in a spaceship carrying colonists to a new planet. It is crewed by six clones, who all wake up to a grisly murder scene--their own. Fortunately, they were able to resurrect new clones, but their memories have been wiped away and there are no new clone bodies

available. Needless to say, I had high hopes for this intriguing concept, but unfortunately, I found the dialogue a bit wooden and the back-and-forthing in time more than a little confusing, so it didn't quite live up to my expectations.

LibraryThing member 2wonderY

I'm seriously impressed.

This is a complex story, built in a future world. Lafferty manages to hold all the strings together with only minor tangling. The plot device where the characters have only just met isn't as strong as it might be. There are too many built in relationship sub-themes; the crew

seem subconsciously to already have a history with each other and the ship - a familiarity that doesn't quite gel with the fact that they just woke with pre-launch memories.

The coding of memories and personality is also a stretch. It's essential to the story, but Maria's modifications to the coding are awfully easy.

It's hard to say whether these weaknesses even could be resolved. Fiction versus reality, y'know?

The fact that the author also narrates the audio version blows me away. Usually talents are more narrow. The narration is of a professional quality.

I'm very curious to read it again, from a perspective of already understanding the full story. It might even increase my admiration.

LibraryThing member kgodey

I haven’t read any good sci-fi in a while, so I was looking forward to reading SIX WAKES. I’ve enjoyed Mur Lafferty’s other works (The Shambling Guides series), and liked them.

SIX WAKES is about a crew of a generation ship who wake up in clone bodies to a scene of carnage – their previous

bodies are all dead or dying, and the last twenty five years of their memories are missing. As they try to reconstruct what happened and figure out who among them is a murderer, we learn more about their past lives and the politics of cloning.

The real star of this book is the concept of cloning. The author really delves into what our world would evolve into in a few hundred years if cloning and mindmapping was commonplace. I don’t agree with some of the predictions, but they’re consistent and fit the story well. First, we see what “normal” clones are like, and then we are slowly exposed to some of the bizarre (but completely understandable) ways that the technologies could be used.

The characters are good, but they’re a little flat, and I didn’t feel like I was able to connect with them. This could be because of expectations – the author’s Shambling Guides books are urban fantasy, and it’s a staple of the genre to show exactly what the protagonists are feeling and thinking. This is a very different kind of books, everyone on board has secrets they are hiding from each other and from the reader, so they’re pretty tightly buttoned up. I felt like that made the reveals a little awkward, because every member of the crew is also a point of view character at some point, but even though we know their immediate feelings, they never think about their secrets until after they are revealed. I understand that that kept the tension in the story, but I couldn’t help feeling like some of the revelations seemed to come from nowhere.

Sometimes I felt like the book had too much human drama, but the conclusion of the story is satisfying – the technology is cool throughout, but in the end, everything comes down to human decisions.

LibraryThing member adamwolf

I got hooked on this, really really hard. It's a murder mystery with clones in space. Mur Lafferty is getting better with each book, and this is quite good, but I had a few small problems with it.

All but two of those problems are integral to how the plot works out, so... shrug?

LibraryThing member semjaza

Fast-paced and enjoyable. Murder mysteries! Lost memories! Cloning ethics! Space! I'd be interested in a sequel.

LibraryThing member TadAD

This book had a rather interesting premise: the six members of a colony ship wake up in new cloned bodies, facing their murdered previous bodies, and missing the last few decades of their memories. All have secrets from each other as they are criminals offered a pardon in exchange for their

service. It's somewhat of a science fiction And Then There Were None.

The characters were interesting if not terribly deep. The pacing was quick. The plot was generally well-constructed until the end when we had a bit of a deus ex machina to save the day. That last annoyed me and drops this from a Recommend, but fans of the genre(s) may enjoy it.

LibraryThing member Cataloger623

An enjoyable dive into the societal impact and ethical questions on a society where cloning and personality hacking (the ability to alter a personality like computer code) are common. Can it be said that a person giving -up heir life for a cause is truly making a sacrifice if they know they will

come back to life later? What will be the religious consequences of cloning? Do clones have souls. Does life get devalued if a person cannot die? All these issues addressed in a well written mystery set in an interstellar generation ship.

LibraryThing member majkia

Rating: Impressive!

Ostensibly, this is a locked-room murder mystery. In reality it is a pretty deep dive into philosophy - of life, of what life is, of what is really important, and of what you choose to do with that life.

It's the story of a generation ship, where the only crew awake are six

clones. The story begins as the clones are awoken amidst carnage. Their previous clones have all been murdered. Blood and other fluids are floating all over the room. All over the ship. And the clones have no memories of what happened, who killed them, why it happened, and not much of an idea what to do about it all. Their AI computer has been hacked and is inaccessible.

Although there is a lot of action, there is also a lot of pretty deep thought on the implications of cloning, of AIs, of betrayal, revenge and finding a way to live with past actions you cannot undo, no matter how much you might wish to do so.

LibraryThing member annhepburn

This was a fun read, I love the concept of Agatha Christie meets Aliens meets Orphan Black meets The Thing. It's a classic set-up with a sci-fi twist, and for someone like me who doesn't read tons of sci-fi, the technology was explained in a very straightforward way, allowing for the various hidden

secrets and the mystery to take centre stage. It felt a lot like the various Doctor Who episodes in which a group of people are trapped in outer space or deep underwater and have to survive, and has a similar tone that vacillates between horror and comedy in a really engaging way.

LibraryThing member quondame

This is an intriguing book, a closed room mystery where the victims and murderers don't remember recent decades as they all wake up 25 years into a space flight in new clones with old memories, with their previous bodies floating about them. It seems that everything that could go wrong is - the

food synthesizer only produces hemlock, the AI is down and the logs are lost, the ship is off course, and they find a prior clone of the captain in a coma in the medical bay. As the six were criminals who undertook to crew the colony flight as a way to completely bury their pasts none of them are happy to share what motives might have lead to the blood bath. The use and implications of the cloning and mind-mapping technologies are the real stars of this book - I didn't really get a feel for any of the characters as people rather than as collections of capabilities and issues. The writing is good, and the plot moves almost quickly enough. Because of all the so-similar backstory material included it did drag a bit from time to time. I liked and admire this book, but do not love it.

LibraryThing member LisCarey

Maria Arena is one of the six crew members of the generation starship Dormire.

Like the other five crew members, she's a clone. Clones at this time have some specific rights, and some specific limitations on their rights, compared to non-clones, who are simply called "humans."

While waking up in a

cloning vat isn't unusual, it is unusual to to wake up covered in blood, and to have no memory of how you died. It's even more unusual to discover you and four other members of the crew have been murdered, and the sixth crew member, the captain, is lying in the medical bay injured and in a coma. But her new clone has been awakened, too, making one of them an illegal copy.

They've been en route nearly twenty-five years, and the mind maps they presumably made in that interval have all been wiped. One of them is a murderer, and they have no idea which one or why, and they have no memories of the quarter century of time they've spent in space together and the events that may have led up to the crime.

After that, every additional piece of information they get makes things worse.

They have a cargo full of passengers in cryogenic storage, nearly two centuries to go in their journey to the world they're to colonize, and oh yes, it turns out they all have motives for murder, and criminal records that successful completion of this trip would have wiped out.

They aren't, as they were told, a crew carefully selected to be successful together.

And the ship's AI is turning them around, to head back to Earth, where they could all be executed.

Generation starship, clones, strong AI, and a murder mystery where everyone is a suspect.

Can they solve it before the return to Earth is irreversible? Or before whoever the killer is does it again?

It's a very character-driven story with the sf elements, cloning, AI, and centuries-long star travel, all essential to the plot. All the characters are flawed; they've all done bad things in their past. And they all have real strengths.

Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

LibraryThing member nkmunn

If there were ever a great SciFi take on a closed circle of suspects murder mystery, this is it!

LibraryThing member renbedell

A SF mystery novel of who killed who with 6 people locked on the spaceship. The murder mystery is expanded on with the SF of cloning, space travel, and unique character history. Exploring each character and how they ended up on the ship is slowly disclosed, which is a nice way to learn about the

characters and try to guess for yourself who is the villain of the story. It is written really well and intriguing the whole way through. The audiobook is narrated by the author, who does a good job reading the book, but she doesn't do any voice acting. So all the characters sound the same and there is very little emotion in the reading.

LibraryThing member rivkat

I ordered this because it was the only Hugo nominee I hadn’t read. Um. Six clones (bearing most of the memories of their originals) wake up on a spaceship where their previous iterations have all been violently killed, except for the one in a coma. Their recent memories are lost. They and the

ship’s AI, who’s also lost a lot, have to figure out what’s going on. Semi-spoiler: the cause is a plan that is not sheer elegance in its simplicity. I was pretty bored and uninterested in the characters, mostly an unappealing lot though some of them for good reasons.

LibraryThing member Stevil2001

This book has an amazing opening and an amazing premise. A locked room murder mystery where all the victims and all the suspects are mindwiped clones. All six members of the ship's crew have just been killed and resurrected, but they don't remember which of their number did it because the memory

backups of their lives on the ship have been erased. The opening, with the clones waking up amid the zero-g remains of their previous bodies, is incredible.

Unfortunately, the energy of the novel slowly dissipates after that point. Mystery is a hard genre to write, and Lafferty doesn't really succeed. I feel like the characters kind of wander around aimlessly instead of investigating, and the revelation of facts feels like information-dumping, not slowly unspooling clues. In a good mystery, when the killer is revealed you go "Oh........" as everything slots into place. In this one, unfortunately, you just go "Oh." because the reveal feels arbitrary. Any one of the main characters could have done it, and it would have made just as much sense, which is profoundly unsatisfying. I'd like to see someone else have a go at this premise, though, because it is irresistible.

LibraryThing member fred_mouse

Recommended for those who like complex, layered plots; intrigue; cyberpunk; and can deal with a generally nasty setting and unloveable characters.

There is a lot going on with this story, which centres on the six individuals who are running a generation ship, who all wake as clones having lost

decades worth of memories of their work together. None of these characters are likeable, and I appreciate that, even while I struggled to get invested. All of them have been selected because of their criminal past, and none of them know what it is that the others have done. I never really did warm to any of the characters except Maria, who got quite a bit of the screen time. By the end of the book, Lafferty has managed to make her more a victim of circumstance than a hardened criminal, which is neither wholly true nor wholly false.

While I struggled with the characters, I did get very invested in the plot and the world building, especially as details of the past lives of the clones came out. I had initial misgivings about mixing a limited group murder mystery with clones in space, but Lafferty mostly manages to balance the two.

LibraryThing member Narilka

Apparently locked room mysteries have become my June reading theme. This time the setting is in deep space on a ship crewed by six clones who wake up in their to their new lives in the midst of a scene of horror with no memories of what events caused them to be reborn. The only thing that's clear

is someone is a murderer and they must be discovered before the cycle begins again.

This was a fun little scifi mystery. We have six characters and six points of view. Each character's back story is revealed as the story progresses which helps paint a complete picture exactly why each of these people are on this ship at this time.

The scifi aspects of the world building were fascinating. I really liked Lafferty's idea of cloning and how a person's mind/personality is able to be carried forward. Plus the fact that a person leaves their inheritance when they die to their clone instead of their children just struck me as hilarious! The impacts of the cloning technology on society are vast. It also sparks some interesting ethical questions, which is a theme that the characters consider throughout the story.

As to the mystery, I called it at about 40%. Not the exact solution, but fairly close. It was still a lot of fun to read and join the characters on their discovery of what actually happened before they woke up. This was a lot of fun and could appeal to both science fiction and mystery fans.

LibraryThing member lavaturtle

I loved this book! I especially liked the gradual reveal of the characters' backstories and how those fit into the main mystery. The exploration of the cultural role and implications of cloning was also super neat. I would love to read more about these characters, past the point where this story

leaves off.

LibraryThing member jen.e.moore

I loved the plot and the characters, but something about the prose just rubbed me the wrong way.

LibraryThing member mainrun

The book's layout is the one I do not like: it starts in the future and then flashes back to scenes that have already taken place. I would be much more impressed if things are told real time and the plot is as exciting. I think that is hard to do though, so am understanding this method better. This

author did a good job.I kept thinking, "why would anyone want to get these people together, and set it up like this?" Once it was revealed I had a "oh - yeah, that was actually revealed quite early and it just went over my head." I liked how all the characters had contacts in the past, and how it was all brought together. Very close to giving this book three stars, but in the end I was eager to get back to it so bumped it to four.
58 members; 3.83 average rating; 3/19/2017

LibraryThing member Aula

I loved this book and I didn't... I loved the premise, the characters, and the set-up. I did not like the errors (e.g. two characters walk to the theatre to talk, but the next scene has them talking in one of the characters' sleeping quarters; at least twice the name of the character talking was

the wrong one - i.e. Maria was said to be talking but it was actually Joanna). The entire book read as if it needed another good going through by an editor and then author: one draft short of being really good.

This all said, it was a book I that started and then read exclusively of the other books I was currently reading, which only happens when I'm truly captivated. The errors really bothered me, however... hence the 3 stars.

LibraryThing member creighley

A crew of clones awakens aboard a space ship to discover that they’re being hunted and any one of them might be the murderer. Maria Arena wakes up in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood. She has no recollection of her other life. Marie’s vat is one of seven. Each containing a clone of a

crew member of their starship.

Awards

Hugo Award (Nominee — Novel — 2018)

Nebula Award (Nominee — Novel — 2017)

Philip K. Dick Award (Nominee — 2017)

Lariat Adult Fiction Reading List (Selection — 2018)

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2017-01

Physical description

400 p.; 5.5 inches

ISBN

9780316389686

Local notes

Inscribed (San Jose, August 2018).

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