The crew of the generation spaceship Dormire wakes up in the middle of a zero-gee slaughter. Floating droplets of blood are everywhere, bodies are hanging in mid air roughly wherever they were stabbed, or poisoned, or strangled. The victims are…the crew. The ship is run entirely by clones, who have no memory of the last twenty-six years.
Mur Lafferty’s Hugo-nominated book is a locked-room mystery where the victims have to solve their own murder. This is made much harder due to the fact that none of the three men or three women aboard the ship have any way of knowing if they fall into the category of “victim” or “murderer”.
“Why murder the crew, why turn off the grav drive, why spare the captain, why did I kill myself, and why did I apparently feel the need to take off one shoe before doing it?”
We jump right into the action with the disturbing reanimation of all the crew members, who then have to try to parse what the actual hell with no frame of reference. The last everyone remembers, they were boarding the ship at the start of the hundred-year trip to a new planet. Sure, the plan was for everyone to follow the usual process of getting a new cloned body whenever the current one wears out. But all the ship’s records have been purged so who knows if anyone ever got a new body before now? Or anything else about the last couple of decades?
The concept of a society where people can create full-grown clones of themselves so their memories and personality can be uploaded into a new body when they die has been done before, but Lafferty tackles a few sticky social and legal issues that I haven’t seen addressed in other stories.
Overcrowding becomes an issue when people are effectively immortal, so everyone can only have one clone of themselves at a time (newer clone takes precedence) and by law clones have to be sterile. Advancements in science mean you can tweak DNA to solve inherited medical and/or mental issues (imagine having to go through terminal conditions every time your body dies)…however. There are many, many ways that this can be abused (the term “bathtub babies” is just one of the more horrific examples) and there’s been at least one case of a famous person being kidnapped and having their mind reprogrammed, so by the time the story starts all DNA tampering has been outlawed, period.
The laws governing clones haven’t made things better (in fact it could be argued that they made things worse), and there have been years of domestic unrest and fighting between humans and clones. We see all of this in the alternating chapters where Lafferty explores the history of each character.
I enjoyed the gradual unfolding of the world, the little tidbits about what life in a post-cloning society would be like. I particularly liked the Mad Tea Party feel to high-society parties, where people would hire assassins to take out rival clones as a particularly mean-spirited joke; a party wasn’t considered a success unless at least one guest is murdered over hors d’oeuvres and has to be reanimated the next day with no memory of the party, otherwise known as “The Worst Hangover”.
There’s also the ongoing discovery of the character’s background, a lot of which has to stay hidden from their fellow crewmembers, since every member of the crew is a convicted felon and has been promised a “fresh start” on a new planet and, oh yeah, all of them have something in their past that would make them the most likely candidate for the murderer. Then there’s the history that not even the characters remember, both during the lost twenty-something years aboard the ship as well as those times on Earth when they’ve woken up and realized they’ve lost days or weeks, not knowing how their previous body was killed, or why, or what may have been…done to it.
The setting is intriguing, and so is the overarching murder mystery. Unfortunately I don’t think the book lives up to the promise of the first few chapters.
Part of it is that there is so much going on that we don’t have time to really flesh out some of the characters to the point where we really bond with them. I would have liked to see more about Wolfgang’s life as a “hunter”, or Katrina’s career as 
a 007-style assassin (with her loyal maidservant/MMA fighter Rebecca). Oftentimes the characters ended up feeling a little flat, or their reactions didn’t quite fit with what was going on around them since the author had to include some kind of clumsy description of their tone in addition to what they actually said. And the villains were practically two dimensional. There are admittedly some truly disturbing things that can be done when you can alter someone’s brain or kill them as many times as you have spare bodies for them, but it’s less effective when they’re being done by cartoonish bad guys and their sniveling henchmen.
The story gets more and more convoluted as it goes on. I can appreciate the elaborate connections between all the characters, and the intricate ways that everything was set up for everyone to arrive where they were, but after a while it felt a little convenient. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I had a hard time buying that anyone would want the end result, much less have the ability to make it happen. And that’s not even getting into the “science” that sometimes came very close to “Um, a wizard did it!” Lafferty gives you most of the elements you need for the ending, but by then I felt exhausted by the massive last-second info dump it took to get there. In many ways the story feels like something that would have worked better as a series of stories, rather than trying to mash it all together in one book.