The Sword and Laser discussion

Read the first 5% or so and...what? First is the "waking up" thing which is supposed to be verboten for opening a story. K, Altered Carbon did it well but let's not make this a new trope on account of one book flouting convention and doing it well. Then there's the list of rules for Clones. So either the opener is totally setting up a fight between young clones who don't want to die versus their older counterparts, or it'll be an unfired Chekov's Gun.

Well, that and the gore. Not a fan of that, I know others are, so that at least gets a pass from me. I wonder how the author will recover from this. *squints at marketing material* Aaaaand I see the book was nominated for the Hugo AND the Nebula. Well then! *brushes off* Let's see what the rest of the book has in store...

1) Keep reading. There's no point in judging anything 5% in. That's what, 15 pages?
2) The gore is natural. The setup is that they were gruesomely murdered. Stabbing people isn't sanitary.
3) The clone rules are more about the worldbuilding and make sense as you read the book.

The audiobook is only 9.7333 hours. Should be easy to get through.

^ Yeah, after two days I am now at the 50% mark. Anyhoo, spoiler protecting for those who haven't read that far...

(view spoiler)[The book has settled down into a solve-your-own-murder mystery. I'd call it Noir since the concept has been done in that genre, except that I haven't seen anyone called "Dame," seen anyone with a "gat," and no one's wearing a fedora.

With the discovery of the comatose Captain in the medbay we get to see "clone contention" in action. I'm having a hard time buying into the idea that any living being would cheerfully go to its own demise in the way that unselected clones are expected to. But hark! There's memory consolidation possible. The issue seems to be mostly a threat that keeps the crew on the straight and narrow rather than an actual issue for them.

This issue reminds me obliquely of a story I read in, I think, Omni, quite some years ago. A guy is fat and unfit (there's that "fat is bad" trope again) and decides to be cloned and have the new version of himself carry on, as he's done several times before. He sees his fit new clone leave the lab and asks what is next, expecting a painless death. Nope, the lab staff take him to a rural area where he sees a variety of people working physical labor farm jobs. One is a gaunt, fit man. They're all versions of himself and the gaunt guy is the original of him. He's forced to carry on and confront what made him give up in the first place.

Moving on...it's worth noting that Mur Lafferty was editor of the much loved (deservedly so) Escape Pod for two years. The book is quite tightly written, showing her editor's eye. I haven't even seen a typo and I find them in tradpub books all the time. Lafferty seems to write as she would expect to edit, as for instance the diversity of the crew would fit Escape Pod's expectations.

Early elements introduce later elements that explain the initial situation. So for instance we see the shadowy Sallie Mignon for the first time around page 100, and her later actions are slowly unfolding as the reason for the ship and the crew. Did she plan the murders? I suppose we'll find out in the second half.

The murder mystery part is tightly plotted and given the setup, believable. Other parts of the book are less so. For instance, we're told early on that the ship is proceeding on solar sail and a "grav drive." The ship also rotates for pseudo-grav by centripetal force. Okay, so then why :
* is it several times stated that the ship "will continue to spin for some time on inertia." (P140) No, in space it will spin forever. Then there's the hydroponic garden that is built like a classic tube habitat. It was apparently fine until the grav drive went off. O...kay? But rotation would continue and so would pseudo-grav. At the least this is poorly explained.

The big search for food seems odd and representative of poor planning on the mission builder's part, since there's no emergency rations. But then there's the hydroponic garden, so why not get some quick food from there? Or is there a whole hydroponic garden with nothing edible in it?

And then timing. They're 24 years in and 3 light years from Earth, with about 7 left to get to Tau Ceti. That implies a journey of give or take 70-80 years. But it's elsewhere stated to take 400 years all in. Er, why?

Anyhoo, lots to like on the book. It's a solid insomnia read. Some parts as above take me out of it suspended disbelief. (hide spoiler)]

John (Taloni) wrote: "^ Yeah, after two days I am now at the 50% mark. Anyhoo, spoiler protecting for those who haven't read that far..."

I enjoyed both of your posts John, including the spoiler. I'm about a third of the way through myself and should finish in a couple weeks.

I also thought the "waking up with no memory" was a bit cliché. Not as irritating as The Rook but still....

I thought the Rules of Cloning or whatever were possibly a nod to Asimov's Laws of Robotics. I skimmed them, feeling certain that a more in-depth discussion of them was coming up in the book.

My biggest issue is the expository dialogue, which is excessive even for a science fiction book. "As you know, the history of cloning tells us..." I'd prefer a subtler way of working this information into the narrative.

I assume the ending has to be fairly interesting since the book is pretty average so far.

John (Taloni) wrote: "^ Yeah, after two days I am now at the 50% mark. Anyhoo, spoiler protecting for those who haven't read that far...

The book has settled down into a solve-your-own-murder mystery. I'd call it Noir ..."

I had similar issues with the book, and after talking to Dara I ended up on 2 stars because of those.

In its favor I will reiterate what John said about it being nice and lean, and Lafferty does the Chekhov’s Gun thing well by utilizing tech that she set up earlier, something other authors could learn to do better.

Unfortunately she’s treading the same water as John Varley when it comes to stories about solving clone murders, and no one is as good as he.

I ended up being generous and giving it 3 stars. What made little sense to me was (view spoiler)[ if they could create clone bodies on demand, why were all the colonists in cryo storage? That would seem to be a huge waste of resources maintaining them for hundreds of years when they could just recreate the bodies when they got to the other end. (hide spoiler)]

^ At 85% mark now, must...avoid...temptation...to...open...spoiler!

(see y'all tomorrow, possibly later today.)

AndrewP wrote: "I ended up being generous and giving it 3 stars. What made little sense to me was [spoilers removed]"

That actually made sense to me (view spoiler)[ the book established that there is a social divide between humans and clones. The ship's colonists consist of not only clones but humans (I really didn't like this terminology btw) and since a good proportion of humans don't want to be cloned and lose their ability to have children cyro storage was the only option. The clones, other than the crew, were stored as data. (hide spoiler)]

I found the book really engaging although once I was done I started finding areas where had issues and that makes no sense. (view spoiler)[ commenting out genes for MS like we're dealing with programming code really? DNA and brains don't work that way<\spoiler> (hide spoiler)]

Aaaand...done. Oh, I suppose I should spoiler-protect:

(view spoiler)[The good first: Interesting character studies and motivations. As SFnal murder mysteries go, pretty well done. TBH I expected Sallie Mignon to pop out at the end to enjoy her revenge. Or perhaps to have been duplicated, perhaps many times, in a hidden part of the ship. Or even that there was no mission and they had never left the solar system. Kind of refreshing that Lafferty stuck with a murderer that evolved from the clues in the book instead of going for a surprise.

But then the, well, not so good. The past of each character wasn't introduced organically into the story. It was more like "It's so and so's turn, here's the background." Okay, yeah, each one got a "wake" and then there's that pun, a wake like the celebration of life for a dead person, and all six woke up in the cloning bay. But as a storytelling device, "here's the background" got kind of old.

And then the bad: Soooo many unforced errors. Perhaps the most egregious is the food printer. It can read your memories from saliva? After establishing that a mindmap was needed, in a way that made plenty of sense? Yeah, I can't go along with that.

Space, apparently, now has friction, since once the drive went off a character said "we're losing momentum." Really? Say they're losing thrust if you must, but momentum is conserved. And then supplies being stored on wooden pallets. On an interstellar mission planned for decades. Or Hiro being presented as "just fine with the gravity" because he's earth-born. Except it was already established that clones were brought out in peak physical condition, so gravity shouldn't be a problem for any of them.

Plus the idea of commenting out code in a person's brain is just weird. I wind up with the impression that Lafferty had heard of several subjects and had at most an inch-deep understanding of them.

Anyway. Hugo and Nebula nominated. I can see it for the character work, but the science? We are a long way from the days when Ringworld beat out Tau Zero for the prize. (hide spoiler)]

John (Taloni) wrote: "Aaaand...done. Oh, I suppose I should spoiler-protect:"


(view spoiler)[ I completely agree with you about the science. This is why I often think that authors should do black boxes for things instead of doing slap dash jobs. And generally takes away from the overall quality of the story.

I'm still wondering how one would comment out a gene without that being a worse result. Cries in Bioinformatics. (hide spoiler)]