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The Echo Wife
by Sarah Gailey
3.5⭐ An engaging story but one that had too many problematic issues to hang together really well.
The basic premise is that we have our protagonist, a research scientist in a commercial concern, who has come up with a way to clone people and load the memories from the original person to create duplicates who, in theory, can be used as body-doubles for people in danger of assassination (or something... it's pretty sketchy and glossed over). Our protagonist and her academic professor husband are getting a divorce because of long work hours, conflicting expectations, and his infidelity with a clone of our protagonist.
This book takes a bunch of impossible situations and sort of tosses them all up in the air together and tries to run a plot through them before they all hit the ground. In a world that's written as day-after-tomorrow United States what non-government researcher is going to get funding for a project that essentially creates living copies of real people for the purpose of being targets (the ethical/moral/legal ramifications boggle the mind). One presumes from the early chapters that creating a functional clone is a complicated process that requires a lot of attention, specialized equipment, and a controlled environment but the husband who's presented to us as university prof manages to do this on the sly? Then there's the issues of creating a clone of an existing person giving them a new name and just expecting the rest of the world to not notice... and why the original researcher didn't go straight to the cops when she discovered the clone? There are a lot of different suspension of disbelief buttons you gotta stand on. And to top it off the protagonist is a generally difficult, irascible and unlikable character.
All that being said the story is interesting, with several well done plot twists that took the story in very unexpected directions (which also added some additional disbelief buttons...)
The basic premise is that we have our protagonist, a research scientist in a commercial concern, who has come up with a way to clone people and load the memories from the original person to create duplicates who, in theory, can be used as body-doubles for people in danger of assassination (or something... it's pretty sketchy and glossed over). Our protagonist and her academic professor husband are getting a divorce because of long work hours, conflicting expectations, and his infidelity with a clone of our protagonist.
This book takes a bunch of impossible situations and sort of tosses them all up in the air together and tries to run a plot through them before they all hit the ground. In a world that's written as day-after-tomorrow United States what non-government researcher is going to get funding for a project that essentially creates living copies of real people for the purpose of being targets (the ethical/moral/legal ramifications boggle the mind). One presumes from the early chapters that creating a functional clone is a complicated process that requires a lot of attention, specialized equipment, and a controlled environment but the husband who's presented to us as university prof manages to do this on the sly? Then there's the issues of creating a clone of an existing person giving them a new name and just expecting the rest of the world to not notice... and why the original researcher didn't go straight to the cops when she discovered the clone? There are a lot of different suspension of disbelief buttons you gotta stand on. And to top it off the protagonist is a generally difficult, irascible and unlikable character.
All that being said the story is interesting, with several well done plot twists that took the story in very unexpected directions (which also added some additional disbelief buttons...