Mur Lafferty

Clones, murders, spaceships and mayhem. A little on the gory side - I had to take a few breaks and read ahead when someone lost an eye in too graphic details for my delicate sensibilities

A truly interesting science fiction novel set on a colony space ship bound for a new planet. To get around the very long travel time (no FTL travel here) it is crewed by clones, all with their own secrets and motivations to commit to a 400 year long travel with only 5 other people as company.

The plot revolves around the murder of the crews previous clones, and the 25 years missing memories that proceed their murders and reawakening in new bodies.

The use of technology is very satisfactory without verging into hard science fiction, and although the story takes place on a spaceship, there are hints of cyber punk.

The internal logic of the plot is sometimes missing - for instance, one character has, for clone reasons, two sets of childhood memory, although we are told that cloning is always done with adult bodies. And the overarching plot bringing all the different threads together is not very believable or well-founded, making it feel very deux-ex-machina and not very satisfactory.… (altro)

1.75 stars. there's a lot here that she did that i really liked, at least in theory. it felt unusual and interesting to me to have the ship be sentient and even have familial relationships with other ships. i liked all the different ways that people and different types of aliens all related and coexisted. the communication that she both developed and bypassed (with a translator implant) seemed innovative to me. i don't have much experience with science fiction, though, especially this type - space and aliens are particularly hard for me and i'm very much predisposed to dislike this.

so for me this was too heavy on the sci-fi and too light on the mystery, and i wasn't all that into it overall. but did see how someone who likes sci-fi might enjoy this. and i do think it was well done, in the sense that she incorporated sentient aliens/bugs/space stations/etc and things like this in a very accessible way. and there was humor, which i don't generally expect in sci-fi (or often in mystery).

so i guess i appreciate this for what it was and how she did it, but this wasn't for me.… (altro)

A murder mystery in space, with many, many coincidences and points of view.

First, I did enjoy this book, it was fun, the world building was fun, the different species on the station were fun and I enjoyed the main characters. And to my surprise, the various many threads of plot points did all end up coming together in the end, and it was a satisfying end.

So far I have enjoyed each of the authors books but that being said, there are some unfortunate consistencies with Mur Lafferty's writing. One is that everything feels kind of shallow and there aren't any real surprises. The second is that in every single book I've ready by her, there is something, a scene or chapter or writing technique that is upsetting or shouldn't be there. And in this book just after the half way point in the book she began to insert several totally unnecessary POV CHAPTERS for minor background characters that don't really matter or chapters spent on a POV flashbacks to events that could have been summarized in a few short sentences. And every time one of these POV's started the book just slammed to a stop and became a slog to get through. It felt like the author had spent so much time on the world building and background characters that she just couldn't bring herself to let them go, even though the book would have been a thousand times better without them. It took me days to get through less than 100 pages.

Once that part stopped and she finally got back to the plot of the book, it started to flow much better and went back to being a fun read. And as I said above, for me the ending was satisfying. And I am looking forward to reading the sequel.… (altro)