Tannat

Six Wakes is a murder mystery on a spaceship where the clones of the crew wake up to a scene of bloody carnage and find that someone has killed all of their previous incarnations. In this future world, cloning can be used as a way to extend life beyond the natural span since a technique has been developed to map people’s minds and upload them into the clone bodies. All of the clones waking up on the ship Dormire are missing their most recent memories of who actually killed them all, although they’re sure it’s one of them. Oh, and almost 25 years have passed even though their memories consist of them all boarding yesterday.

The mystery is explored through the crew’s investigation on the ship and through their individual backstories (the parts they remember). There are a couple cases where the reader gains information that the character in question couldn’t possibly know because the events described continue past the point where that person’s last mindmap was created. It’s nice information to have though.

I thought the mystery was interesting and although its resolution didn’t wow me, it seemed logical. Although we visit each of the characters in turn, we spend a lot of time in Maria’s head, so I’d probably consider her the main character. I didn’t really buy interstellar travel using a solar sail even if it wasn’t purely reliant on photons but I was able to ignore most of the physics aspects that bugged me and enjoy the book anyway. There was also some language that jarred me a bit, like referring to “heavy gravity” as opposed to, say, “high gravity”.

I think I may need to reread it at some point to see if I get anything else out of the crew’s stories the second time through. It may or may not make me increase my rating, but right now I’m going with: it was pretty good, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to give it a full four stars.