Six Wakes

I was excited for Six Wakes in Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club because it sounded like a sci-fi whodunnit, with a fun twist that everyone involved is a clone on a generation space ship.

Turns out, it was a less of a whodunnit and more just an intellectual riff on human cloning. Was the problem with me? Was it in the book? Was it false advertising or did I just make certain assumptions based on my own predilection for whodunnits? Who knows!

Our characters, all clones who are crew on a generational space ship full of humans in cryostasis, wake up to a serious emergency: they’ve all been murdered and one of them is the killer. Unfortunately, their most recent memory updates are from twenty-four years earlier, when they first came aboard the ship. Time to play some real-life Mafia! The book jumps back and forth between developments on the ship and each character’s backstory: turns out their random selection to crew this vessel was not entirely random after all.

Unfortunately (for me), you can’t approach the book from a whodunnit perspective. I’m not a genius at these sorts of things, I don’t always or even often guess the killer before the parlor scene, but you do get into a reading mode where you file away innocuous little details that the author seemingly drops off-hand because they tend to be important clues later. A mug is found wedged under a console and a character muses he must have been getting sloppy in his past life if he was drinking from open containers around the computers. The same character, upon stumbling across his corpse (death by hanging), takes pains to notice that he only has one boot on. Things like that.

Details that turn out to be entirely extraneous!

The mystery in the book is the same flavor of the worst Detective Conan stories: essential pieces of backstory are withheld until it’s too late for the reader to make any use of it themselves. There are no actual clues, just a great deal of foreshadowing. Sometimes, ironically, too much foreshadowing: one character isn’t actually a clone, except the hints that get dropped about their clone-less past are so obvious that I just got frustrated with how long it took the book to confirm it.

As a meditation on identity in the face of cloning and infinite bodies, though, the book also kind of fizzles. While they’re not completely analogous situations, the Trill from Star Trek or the imago machines from A Memory Called Empire do more interesting things with “near-infinite lifespan due to rebooted bodies” than anything that happens in Six Wakes. The juiciest part, philosophically, doesn’t even involve the main characters—it’s a third-act plot twist involving the ship’s AI.

And as for the story, outside of the murder-mystery and philosophical trappings, it’s slightly deflating. Clones and cloning are still controversial on Earth for reasons that feel flimsy at best (all religions take a hardline stance against cloning? really? and seemingly never let up?) and the obvious actual ethical problem with how cloning is set up in the book—the memory backups for clones would basically be like taking a random stranger who happens to look exactly like you and injecting your memories and yourself into them instead of letting them retain their own perceptions or develop their own personality—is never addressed. Maybe the latter is because Lafferty is very frank about how the idea from the story came from a video game mechanic, and once your idea is based on a simple video game technique to reboot a character instead of how cloning actually works, you’re doomed from the start. Other flimsy characterizations and deus ex machina style plot events also feel like Lafferty painted herself into a corner and couldn’t get out, which is never a very satisfying feeling while you’re reading.

I also can’t deal with the cover, at least for the edition I read (pictured above). The body looks like something an art student would have churned out in Blender twenty-odd years ago for an anatomy study in CGI homework assignment. Surely you have more budget than that, Orbit Books! (And, spoiler, no one gets tossed out an airlock into space, so it’s also a bit misleading.)

If you go in with zero expectations and just want something to read on a plane or at the beach, Six Wakes is fine. Good, even. But I went in with high expectations that the story wasn’t able to live up to.

Sam the Cat: Detective

When I moved to Sweden I brought a handful of my favorite children’s, middle grade, and young adult books with me. My motivation was largely nostalgic, but they ended up being useful resources when tutoring.

Sam the Cat: Detective is one that never made an appearance at a lesson. I didn’t have any really cat-obsessed students and I’m not entirely sure all of the detective and noir style elements would have been a productive challenge. In fact, I didn’t re-read it until just a couple weeks ago, when I read it out loud to my sambo over a weekend. (His new-found appreciation for audiobooks means that he also enjoys me reading out loud to him; this is hardly the first book we’ve enjoyed together like this.)

Scholastic edition of Sam the Cat: Detective

I distinctly remember loving the hell out of this book as a kid, to the point where I read it multiple times. I generally don’t get much out of re-reading books until I’ve all but forgotten them, and the same was true for me as a kid, so reading any book more than once was a rarity. What stuck in my memory was the noir-style tone, a couple essential vocabulary words (“fence,” as in a buyer of stolen goods; “cat burglar” (because of course) and very likely “dumbwaiter”) and a very chaotic showdown at the end where a cat burglar is foiled and apprehended by a dozen neighborhood cats.

It turns out adult me also loved the hell out of this book, though maybe not for all of the same reasons.

The writing is definitely a very self-aware hard-boiled detective…homage? parody?…that’s suitable for kids but in no way condescending or dumbed down. At 8 years old I wouldn’t have been conversant with Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, of course, but kids can tell when there’s very Smart Grown-Up Stuff at work (except when they can’t; at the same age I didn’t realize Get Smart was supposed to be funny) and the sense that there was Smart Grown-Up Stuff was without a doubt what a large part of the appeal was for me. There are also jokes for the grown-ups in there, for the parents who would have inevitably been reading this to their kids at bedtime, including an acrobat troupe of cats called Wang, Chang, Sturm, and Drang. And while yes, it’s definitely a play on the old Chinese circus acrobats trope, the cats don’t speak in broken English or cringe-y dialect.

The mystery isn’t bad either. An adult reading it, especially an adult who’s read at least one detective novel in their life, will probably figure out the bulk of the mystery by the time it’s done being set up, but what you lose in the obvious nature of the mystery qua mystery, you gain in appreciation for Stewart’s technical accomplishment in the whole package. The cats are able to solve the mystery faster than the cops because of their different perspective; the story logic doesn’t rely on the target demographic being children. They also have an imaginative and genuinely adorable parallel cat world, with cat celebrities (in this case, cat food commercial animal actors) and cats running businesses like detective agencies and salons, paying each other in cat food and information about humans that feed strays but also very casually making use of telephones, computers, and microwaves. Stewart and her editor also do an excellent job of succinctly explaining the more advanced or specialized vocabulary in a way that fits in smoothly with the rest of the narration, usually with a joke when possible (“Personally, I always thought a dumbwaiter was a server at the restaurant who spilled the wrong kind of soup in your lap…”) Plus, semi-colons. Hallelujah! Just because your book is for children doesn’t mean your prose needs to be dull and repetitive.

Adults who never read it in childhood might not love it the way that I did if they read it now, but that’s okay. I still love it, and that’s all that matters.

Review: Murder in Retrospect, or, Five Little Pigs

Appropriate that I decided to get back to my travelogues this week: the next book in the queue to be discussed here is what I read in the library that day: Murder in Retrospect!

A cover of Agatha Christie's "Five Little Pigs" featuring a small blue bottle, an artist's palette, and a glass of beer next to a brown beer bottle.

Author: Agatha Christie

My GoodReads rating: 3 stars

Average GoodReads rating: 3.96 stars

Language scaling: B2+

Plot summary: A young woman about to marry hires Hercules Poirot to clear the name of her mother, who was convicted of poisoning her husband some years ago.

Recommended audience: Mystery buffs

In-depth thoughts: As I mentioned before, this book was a selection for my Facebook book club. I was surprised to learn that many of the members had never read an Agatha Christie novel before, or even seen one of the innumerable screen adaptations! I went through a huge Agatha Christie binge in middle school. This was about the same time I went through a big band jazz binge as well, so I guess I was a little old lady in a 13-year-old’s body.

Even during my pubescent enthusiasm, I never tackled all of the novels and short stories. (Our school library only had so many books, after all.) Murder in Retrospect (or Five Little Pigs, whichever title you prefer) was one that I hadn’t originally read, so I was excited to read it. I had a nice afternoon in the Bethlehem Public Library doing just that: reading. I finished it in one sitting.

I still love a good Agatha Christie novel, even today, but I have to admit that this one was a little disappointing. There are lots of recurring secondary characters that make a Poirot novel what it is—Miss Lemon, Captain Hastings, Inspector Japp—and none of them make an appearance. The nature of the mystery also means that the bulk of the book is everyone repeating their testimony of the same day. This is, of course, part and parcel of any mystery, but because this is a cold case (or rather, an already-closed case), there’s nothing else for Poirot to go on, nor is there any sense of urgency.  Without any clues to inspect, without any banter with Hastings or Japp, and without the possibility of bringing the true murderer to justice, Murder in Retrospect is more repetitive and less fun than the Christie novels I read when I was younger.

If you’re a mystery buff, you can’t go wrong with an Agatha Christie novel. Even a bad Christie novel is still pretty fun; I’ve always like Christie’s writing style just as much as her mysteries. The repetition in this story might be helpful for English students, but there is also the danger that outdated vocabulary might pose something of a hurdle.  (I can’t recall anything particular as I sit down to write this, but with a book initially published in 1942, I’m sure there are a couple of outdated vocabulary choices.)

Overall, I’m a completionist when it comes to writers I like, so I’m glad I read it. I don’t think Murder in Retrospect will be a novel I pick up again, though.