Clones aboard a generational starship and murder combine in Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes, a taut, engaging thriller that showcases the writer’s skill for plotting and character. Where this one is a bit different is that the victims are “reborn” soon after dying. In Lafferty’s imagined future, clones can regenerate upon death, making them ideal to oversee the flight of 2,000 inhabitants of the starship Dormire. There’s a lot to unpack in this relatively short novel, but Lafferty takes a great approach. When these clones are “reborn,” their memories don’t immediately join them, and the ship’s artificial intelligence is offline, which complicates the situation to a greater degree. Nobody knows what happened, and there’s a murderer in their midst. This is especially troubling because the novel begins with characters awakening in the middle of a very bloody crime scene.
Their deaths were the beginning of the novel.
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