Sailing to the Stars – six wakes (Mur Lafferty)

Ahoy there me mateys!  So me crew has been recommending this one.  It is a sci-fi with murder mystery and philosophical bents.  Six crew members run a generation ship that is supposed to take a 400 year journey to a new planet.  All six of them have criminal backgrounds and if they run this mission successfully then all of them get clean slates on the new planet.  How are they supposed to live that long?  Well, they are clones of course!  Everyone else on board is in stasis.

The hitch is that all six crew members wake up in new bodies at the same time only to find their own dead bodies floating around them.  And they have lost at least 25 years of memories.  They seem to have been rebooted with copies that only contain the memories of up to when they first entered the ship.  The evidence, of course, points to murder but which one of them did it?

So this book is 361 pages.  I adored it up until page 268 and then the momentum went down from there.  This is not to say I didn’t like the book.  I thought the plot was suspenseful, the characters were fun, the legal and philosophical debate around clones was fascinating, the technology was cool, and most of the murder solving was great.  There were flashback scenes that enhanced both the characterizations and the mystery.  I just didn’t love the climax and the ending.  I knew overall why the crew was placed there but didn’t really guess any of the details.  And the details were a mixed bag.  I would say I liked this book very much but overall it left me strangely unsatisfied.

I am however in the minority and most readers seem to have adored it.  So don’t just take me word for it . . .

Check out me other crew members effusive reviews:

Kate @ forwinternights

Mogsy @ bibliosanctum

The author’s website has this to say about the novel:

It was not common to awaken in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood.

At least, Maria Arena had never experienced it. She had no memory of how she died. That was also new; before, when she had awakened as a new clone, her first memory was of how she died.

Maria’s vat was in the front of six vats, each one holding the clone of a crew member of the starship Dormire, each clone waiting for its previous incarnation to die so it could awaken. And Maria wasn’t the only one to die recently…

To visit the author’s website go to:

Mur Lafferty – Author

To buy the novel go to:

six wakes – Book

To add to Goodreads go to:

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