★ 11/28/2016
Lafferty (The Shambling Guide to New York City) takes readers aboard an ill-fated colony ship crewed by criminals in this taut science fiction thriller. Ecological collapse and social and political upheaval have convinced humans to colonize another world: the Earth-like planet Artemis, orbiting Tau Ceti. The ship Dormire carries 2,000 cryo-sleeping colonists and a crew of six clones with criminal pasts who are hoping to build new lives with clean slates. But nearly 25 years into the mission, the crew awaken in the middle of a bloody crime scene. One of them—maybe more than one—is a murderer, the ship is off course, the ship’s AI is offline, all records have been deleted, and there’s no way to communicate with Earth. As suspicions and hostilities rise, it’s not certain who, or what, will survive. Interleaving urgent scenes with telling flashbacks, Lafferty delivers a tense nail-biter of a story fueled by memorable characters and thoughtful worldbuilding. This space-based locked-room murder mystery explores complex technological and moral issues in a way that’s certain to earn it a spot on award ballots. (Jan.)
"Six Wakes is [Mur Lafferty's] breakout book."—Cory Doctorow
"This is one of the cleverest and most exciting murder mysteries I have ever read. The confined space of the colony ship Dormire is filled with feisty and memorably strange characters who bounce off one another in ways that vary from the comic to the horrific. You like ideas in your science fiction? Lafferty does for clones what Asimov did for robots. Six Wakes will keep you turning pages right up to its startling climax. Mur Lafferty scores in this, her best book!"—James Patrick Kelly, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards
"Mysterious and tense . . . . I wish I wrote this book."—New York Times bestselling author Chuck Wendig
"A taut, nerve-tingling, interstellar murder mystery with a deeply human heart."—NPR
"An exquisitely crafted puzzle box that challenges our thoughts on what it means to be human - Six Wakes is a scifi murder mystery of light speed intensity."—New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler
"Lafferty keeps the reader guessing and throws in just enough twists and turns to keep us on the edge of our seat . . . . I loved this book and am excited to read what Lafftery has in store for us next."—Barnes & Noble Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog
"Lafferty delivers a tense nail-biter of a story fueled by memorable characters and thoughtful worldbuilding. This space-based locked-room murder mystery explores complex technological and moral issues in a way that's certain to earn it a spot on award ballots."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Polished writing and a cast of characters who are emotionally on edge make this space adventure a compelling murder-mystery that takes its time revealing the details necessary for readers to rule out possible culprits. The suspense is kept at the forefront of this clever, politically charged tale."—RT Books Reviews
"Lafferty delivers the ultimate locked-room mystery combined with top-notch sf worldbuilding. The puzzle of who is responsible for the devastation on the ship keeps the pages turning."—Library Journal (starred review)
"This is a great book with so much going for it: clever structure, wonderful characters, and a fiendishly clever puzzle that you'll roll over in your mind for months after you close the covers."—BoingBoing
"AndThen There Were None meets Alien in this locked-room, SF-thriller, which grips you from the first scene in the frozen depths of space."—Mysterious Galaxy
"Six Wakes is engrossing and thoroughly satisfying, and Lafferty succeeds at both laying down a mystery and creating a stand-alone sci-fi novel."—Sword & Spaceships (Book Riot)
★ 12/01/2016
Waking up on a spaceship in gravity failure surrounded by dead bodies, the six crew members climb out of their cloning chambers, baffled by what might have caused the carnage. While they can see that their former bodies were attacked, none of them have any memories of the events. In fact, they have no recollection of the past 20-odd years they have apparently been aboard the Dormire. In all their other lives, the clones were brought back to life using stored mind maps that allowed them to keep a continuity with their earlier selves. But now the six survivors must figure out who killed their previous bodies and why. VERDICT Lafferty (Bookburners) delivers the ultimate locked-room mystery combined with top-notch sf worldbuilding. The puzzle of who is responsible for the devastation on the ship keeps the pages turning.—MM
2016-11-06
The fantasist author of the hilarious The Shambling Guide to New York City (2013) ventures into science-fiction horror.The immediate setup will be familiar to mystery fans: five dead bodies, variously stabbed, poisoned, or hanged, and no survivors. Whodunit? We're in the 25th century, however, on a sub-light speed starship whose controlling artificial intelligence, IAN, is offline. The six—gofer Maria Arena, Capt. Katrina de la Cruz, navigator/pilot Akihiro Sato, security chief Wolfgang, engineer Paul Seurat, and Dr. Joanna Glass—wake in new, cloned bodies, covered in slime, surrounded by vats, tubes, gore, and the horror of their own slaughtered corpses, with no idea of what's been happening since the voyage began. They do recall earlier lifetimes, but evidently they were all criminals, so nobody can afford to reveal anything or trust anybody else. And with both the clone-growth and memory-backup processes sabotaged, the bodies they now occupy are their last. Maybe this is all just too devious for its own good. In any event, the narrative never quite lives up to that remarkable opening. Momentum dissipates amid frequent pauses to belabor the cloning process and laws relating to clone succession, not to mention a succession of scientific howlers (for instance, the ship depends for power on a solar sail—but there's no "solar" in interstellar space). Still, as the characters delve separately and together into their previous lives in search of an explanation for their predicament, the tension rises, personalities are revealed, and common factors emerge—some of them, we learn, are retired, recovering, or repurposed homicidal maniacs. You have to wonder why, given Lafferty's manifest talent for humor, she didn't simply play it for laughs. Still, readers easily captivated and not overly concerned with structural dependability will find much to entertain them.
A great advantage to having an author perform her own audiobook is that she knows what characters are thinking. The strongest feature of Mur Lafferty’s narration is the insight she brings to the way lines of dialogue should be spoken and where emphasis should be placed in sentences. Lafferty’s voice is clear, and her pacing is good, but her range is limited, and she makes little effort to distinguish individual character voices, so it’s frequently hard to keep track of which character is speaking or tell where dialogue stops and narrative begins. Aside from that, Lafferty is a decent narrator, and listeners will enjoy her performance of this imaginative story of clones solving the mystery of their own murders. D.L.Y. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
A great advantage to having an author perform her own audiobook is that she knows what characters are thinking. The strongest feature of Mur Lafferty’s narration is the insight she brings to the way lines of dialogue should be spoken and where emphasis should be placed in sentences. Lafferty’s voice is clear, and her pacing is good, but her range is limited, and she makes little effort to distinguish individual character voices, so it’s frequently hard to keep track of which character is speaking or tell where dialogue stops and narrative begins. Aside from that, Lafferty is a decent narrator, and listeners will enjoy her performance of this imaginative story of clones solving the mystery of their own murders. D.L.Y. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
