Six Wakes
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 Cover of first edition | |
| Author | Mur Lafferty |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Orbit Books |
Publication date | 2017 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 361 |
| ISBN | 978-0-316-38968-6 |
Six Wakes is a science fiction mystery novel by Mur Lafferty. It was first published in trade paperback and ebook by Orbit Books in January 2017.[1]
The story takes place aboard the Dormire, a starship carrying thousands of prospective colonists from Earth to a planet in the Tau Ceti star system. All the passengers are in coldsleep; only a six-person crew of cloned former criminals remains awake through the generations-long journey, each of them recloned and imprinted with their continually updated memories as they age and die. The journey is anticipated to take several centuries, and is sponsored by Sallie Mignon, an eccentric multi-billionaire who financed the construction of the Dormire and is currently aboard as a colonist. Cloning technology is not restricted to shipboard life, and a number of laws, called the "Codicils," have sprung up around cloning after numerous abuses of genetic engineering and the "hacking" (deliberate altering) of mindmaps.
The latest clone of crew member Maria Arena awakens twenty-five years into the voyage to discover her most recent self, and those of the rest of the crew, murdered, and her accumulated memories of the whole trip wiped. The new clones of the other crew members prove equally amnesiac as they awaken; the cloning tanks have been sabotaged; and IAN, the ship's guiding artificial intelligence, has been crippled and is taking the starship off course. The result is a locked-room mystery as the six crew members—Captain Katrina de la Cruz; pilot and navigator Akihiro Sato; security chief Wolfgang; engineer Paul Seurat; ship's doctor Joanna Glass; and Maria herself, general housekeeper for the ship—try to determine which of them has murdered their previous selves and sabotaged the voyage, and how to get the voyage back on track.
As the crew attempt to unravel the mystery, each character's history—often extensive, as all of them are clones with lifespans stretching back hundreds of years—allows Lafferty to continue worldbuilding, as many of them were present for significant events in the story's fictional history. As an example, Dr. Glass turns out to have also, in a previous incarnation, been a lawmaker who was instrumental in proposing and ratifying the Codicils, earning her the ire of those whose abuse of genetic engineering and mindmap hacking have now been outlawed. These moments turn out to be crucial in helping the crew decipher the mystery, because somewhere over the course of history, each of them managed to piss someone off...
