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Book Review - Six Wakes

Multiple Award nominated, must read sci-fi thriller!


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Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty, from Orbit Books, published January 2017


This is a locked room murder mystery in space among the six crew members of a colony ship headed to a new world. But one of them is a murderer. They awake to find their previous clone bodies murdered, the ship off course and the ship's computer intelligence offline. As the story progresses on the ship, as each crew member works through mounting tension, we are taken into the backstory of each crew member which deepens the characters and simultaneously makes each of them seem a more likely suspect. Each crew member is a criminal in one fashion or another, and they all have a common link!

By far, the most fun and exciting and engrossing book I read in 2018. Its extremely well thought out and kept me on the edge of my seat, turning pages rapidly! This book is just so much fun to read, keeps you guessing to the end and kept the tension ratcheted. This is a whodunit that you will not quickly forget, not only for the well crafted mystery but the big concepts too. I still think on the ramifications of cloning, both with wonder and with dread.

I insist the author be commended, recognized, lauded even, for constructing the laws of clones; as careful, logical and powerful as Asimov's venerable laws of robotics. She masterfully crafted the social, political and emotional consequences of cloning and it should have won this book awards. It did earn the book plenty of nominations. (Hugo, Nebula, PKD) I am not alone in feeling this book deserved awards, multiple reviewers concur. (like Publishers Weekly, for example)

Oh, the problem with awards when a field is so full of the best craft of its kind in years, and they all get published the same year! Makes choosing only one not just difficult but doesn't give enough recognition the other very deserving works. (Perhaps I will save my rant about awards for another day.)

The author has announced on her hall-of-fame inducted podcast (See her website Murverse.com for podcasts) that she is working on another novel in the Six Wakes universe, and I for one cannot stand the wait until I have it in my hands!

Rating: 10 out of 10 galaxies.

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