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ghostsofthesouthernsong 's review for:
Six Wakes
by Mur Lafferty
Brilliant premise, but an incredibly horrible execution. Six clones tasked to supervise a sleeper ship awake in the aftermath of several grisly murders -- their previously cloned selves. The novel thus asks: What happened to their previous selves? Who is to blame? How will they find out?
Six Wakes unravels the mystery slowly by showing the characters interacting, then revealing their pasts via flashback chapters (which was hidden as every clone is a condemned criminal working aboard), which further added complexity to the murders; you begin to realize that everyone has a potential motive due to various scandals in their previous lives. This was an interesting technique, and it really could have made the novel.
Unfortunately... everything else about it just doesn't work, rendering said technique moot. The most grating part of Six Wakes are the characters. None of them feel like a clone with an intellect and personality spanning several centuries, and instead each and every one feels like a freshman at their first college party. They're immature, far too quippy and either take things way too lightly, or way too seriously! One character would go 'grrrrr this guy is super fishy let's kill him now' and later on when one of them has potentially murdery vibes, another might go, 'nah they're innocent, don't be so quick to judge'! It breaks any sense of tension and for the most part, I was rolling my eyes, wondering when someone was going to get a wedgie. That's honestly how it felt; not a murder mystery set in space, more like a cheap B-film with dumb college kids getting stalked by some mysterious monster... except the monster is really inside you all along! Spooky.
With regards to worldbuilding, there wasn't really anything interesting as well, beyond two bits: Lyfe -- the basic glop thingamajig that's used to create organic structures, ranging from food to clone bodies -- and the consequences of legalized cloning plus personality transfer. The latter would have been an incredibly fantastic theme to explore, but it's basically a backdrop to the events unfolding in Six Wakes, namely in the flashback chapters. I genuinely think those were much more interesting than the main story itself. The payoff to the murder mystery isn't very fun either, the answer is massively unsatisfying and amounted to 'it's always the nerd'.
To conclude, I'm not entirely certain how this was a Hugo nominee, as I don't really think there's much in the way of redeeming quality to justify its inclusion. This needed several more edits at least, maybe an entire rework to really do that premise justice. If you want a good sci-fi novel that won the Hugos, The Calculating Stars is a good start. If you want good sci-fi that uses spaceships and the isolation of space to explore interesting themes within an enclosed human community, The Dark Beyond the Stars is fantastic. If you're looking for a simple horror sci-fi premise that gets you going, I enjoyed Ship of Fools. But I can't recommend this at all.
Six Wakes unravels the mystery slowly by showing the characters interacting, then revealing their pasts via flashback chapters (which was hidden as every clone is a condemned criminal working aboard), which further added complexity to the murders; you begin to realize that everyone has a potential motive due to various scandals in their previous lives. This was an interesting technique, and it really could have made the novel.
Unfortunately... everything else about it just doesn't work, rendering said technique moot. The most grating part of Six Wakes are the characters. None of them feel like a clone with an intellect and personality spanning several centuries, and instead each and every one feels like a freshman at their first college party. They're immature, far too quippy and either take things way too lightly, or way too seriously! One character would go 'grrrrr this guy is super fishy let's kill him now' and later on when one of them has potentially murdery vibes, another might go, 'nah they're innocent, don't be so quick to judge'! It breaks any sense of tension and for the most part, I was rolling my eyes, wondering when someone was going to get a wedgie. That's honestly how it felt; not a murder mystery set in space, more like a cheap B-film with dumb college kids getting stalked by some mysterious monster... except the monster is really inside you all along! Spooky.
With regards to worldbuilding, there wasn't really anything interesting as well, beyond two bits: Lyfe -- the basic glop thingamajig that's used to create organic structures, ranging from food to clone bodies -- and the consequences of legalized cloning plus personality transfer. The latter would have been an incredibly fantastic theme to explore, but it's basically a backdrop to the events unfolding in Six Wakes, namely in the flashback chapters. I genuinely think those were much more interesting than the main story itself. The payoff to the murder mystery isn't very fun either, the answer is massively unsatisfying and amounted to 'it's always the nerd'.
To conclude, I'm not entirely certain how this was a Hugo nominee, as I don't really think there's much in the way of redeeming quality to justify its inclusion. This needed several more edits at least, maybe an entire rework to really do that premise justice. If you want a good sci-fi novel that won the Hugos, The Calculating Stars is a good start. If you want good sci-fi that uses spaceships and the isolation of space to explore interesting themes within an enclosed human community, The Dark Beyond the Stars is fantastic. If you're looking for a simple horror sci-fi premise that gets you going, I enjoyed Ship of Fools. But I can't recommend this at all.