Six Wakes

Written by Mur Lafferty

Narrated by Mur Lafferty

In this Hugo nominated science fiction thriller by Mur Lafferty, a crew of clones awakens aboard a space ship to find they're being hunted-and any one of them could be the killer.

Maria Arena awakens in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood. She has no memory of how she died. This is new; before, when she had awakened as a new clone, her first memory was of how she died.

Maria's vat is one of seven, each one holding the clone of a crew member of the starship Dormire, each clone waiting for its previous incarnation to die so it can awaken. And Maria isn't the only one to die recently. . .

Unlock the bold new science fiction thriller that Corey Doctorow calls Mur's "breakout book".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Jan 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781478913474

Mur Lafferty

Mur Lafferty is a writer, podcast producer, gamer, geek and martial artist. She loves to run, practise kung fu (Northern Shaolin five animals style), play World of Warcraft and Dragon Age and hang out with her fabulous geeky husband and their eight-year-old daughter.

Reviews for Six Wakes

[rena613 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Based on the synopsis, this seems like the type of closed-room mystery we've read before, like something by Agatha Christie, except instead of the stuffy English Manor, we have a spaceship. And that's what it's like at first -- but then we quickly realized there's a lot more to the story than just trying to figure out whodunnit among the six crew members.

These are complicated characters, and we see each one's backstory (and they go really back since they're clones and have lived a couple hundred years already). And we see how they intersect.

One thing I didn't like was how these characters could act immaturely at times, especially considering their advanced age (and with it their presumed added wisdom). Still, this was a compelling story and it raised a lot of questions regarding the ethics of cloning and the consequences of it.

[nigellicus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The clones of six crew members of a colony ship wake up to find their previous selves almost all brutally murdered, but with no memories of the previous twenty-five years of interstellar voyaging, let alone of whatever events led to the slaughter, or who was responsible. With the AI offline and logs wiped and cloning equipment broken, they have to piece together what happened and work out which of them was the murderer - a tricky task since not only does the current version have no memory of their actions, but the entire crew are convicted criminals working for pardons and clean slates in a enw world. Somewhere in their past, back on Earth and Luna, lie the answers. They're all guilty of something, some more bloodily than others, and more closely connected than any of them ever suspected, but who was the killer and why?

Ah, the old waking up on a spaceship with no memory of how you got there. Throw in a murder mystery where the victims are investigating their own murders and a ship full of guilty secrets and the fraught politics of cloning for immortality and you've got a fairly entertaining yarn.

[lou_intheberkshires · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cloning for immortality is a damn scary future to look forward to. She brings up many sensitive futuristic issues that the characters grapple with big time. I liked the murder mystery element & had me going to the end!

[alex259-166087 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I liked the setting and the way we learned about the character history for the first 3/4 of the story, but then it got a little silly while also invalidating a fair part of the setting's history and left too many loose ends in my opinion.

[amberwitch · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[treebeard_404 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is, in part, a locked-room mystery set on a spaceship. The author has done an interesting job of creating the technological underpinnings for the story so that it can all hang together well. But for some reason I cannot put my finger on (which is not all helpful in a review, I know), I didn't find it as satisfying as I think it ought to be. Hence the three-star review. But I would encourage you to read it, nonetheless. Laffterty definitely has talent, and I look forward to reading her work in the future.

[beentsy_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this. Fast pace, ethical & philosophical dilemmas, locked room murder mystery, tonnes of secrets, AI with some personality disorders, and it all takes place in space. So good.

One reader called it Clue in space and that is such a good description.

[kylecarroll · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

DNF @ 34%. It pains me to have to DNF this because I was so excited for this one. But it’s just…bad. There is not a modicum of belivablity to be found within. The dialogue is cringy and unbelievable. The whole book is written like a poor YA novel, with everything blatantly in your face. There is no subtlety or subtext whatsoever. What got me the most was the fact that this story takes place on the world’s first multi-generational colonization mission, and it is entrusted to a crew of 6 criminals who, in exchange for crewing the ship, will have their records scrubbed upon completion. There is literally NO way any bit of that could be remotely plausable even in a futuristic setting.

[tuusannuuska-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

4,3 stars

The further I read, the harder it was to put this down. I enjoyed the plot thoroughly, and the only thing I was disappointed with was the ultimate motive behind the whole thing.

[burritapal · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Crazy! This story is unpredictable, constantly opening up another layer of surprises about the characters that crew spaceship Dormire. Some of the dialog of the crew would sound like they were ad-libbing, especially at the beginning. Maybe that's because we, and they, don't know who they're dealing with.

A skeleton crew of clones is piloting the ship Dormire, with a shipful of cloned bodies in cryosleep, to a planet that will be their new home after the centuries it will take to reach there. All of the action takes place after they've been in flight for 25 years, and years before they will reach their destination. What an imagination!

[schant-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I couldn't really get on with this book. The initial setup with the idea of cloning being widespread & cheap seemed implausible, and sending out "criminal" clones to crew a starship was downright perverse. It's framed up as a locked-room mystery but I didn't really care "whodunnit" or why, though the background "mastermind" was obvious from fairly early on. Unsatisfying.

[jean4duteau · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very good closed room mystery with a very good sci-fi twist. This book captured my imagination and had me guessing whodunnit throughout. It is probably a 4.5 for me due to the slight deus ex machina at the end, but I'm totally willing to round it up to a 5 because it was so enjoyable.

[acdha-128111 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fun sci-fi mystery but some of the technology and world-building felt a bit too driven by plot rather than plausibility

[kinwolf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A satisfying read. In the end, it's alot about cloning ethic, and it brought many valid questions. Nice read.

[sarah220-732610 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book takes place in a future where cloning is available but highly regulated. 6 people are crewing a space ship traveling with thousands of cryogenically frozen humans and clones taking a 400 year journey to a new world. All six wake up in newly cloned bodies in their cloning vats and quickly discover that nearly all of them were murdered (one is just in a coma, one seems to have hanged himself), the gravity drive is not functioning, at least 24 years have passed that they can't remember, and the ship is turning back towards Earth. Oh, and by the way, all the members of the crew are criminals although they don't know each others' crimes. This book is part mystery (who killed them and why), part contemplation of ethics (clones after all), and part psychological analysis. I found the story very compelling. None of the characters are particularly "likeable" but the author has you follow several of them so closely that you can't help but feel some empathy towards them, especially considering how scared and confused they are in the wake of memory loss and mysterious sabotage.

[fence_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I first heard about Six Wakes on Kameron Hurley’s blog. And then on John Scalzi’s Big Idea, and I thought it sounded intriguing. So I went ahead and ordered it. And then I read about it on The Book Smugglers, and I thought, right I’d better read this one. And then it arrived in the post, which confused me a little as I thought I’d ordered the ebook, but obviously not, but even better because I didn’t have my kindle with me at work but that’s where the parcel got delivered to so I was able to start reading it on my lunch break.

It is the story of a spaceship, crewed by clones, but not multiple clones of the same person. These clones are their own clones. So when one dies a new body is gotten ready for them and their mindmap, a copy of their brain, memories and emotions etc., is uploaded into the new body. So cloning is a way of achieving immortality of sorts.

It is also the perfect way for people to crew a ship that will be travelling across space to a new planet for generations. All the passengers are asleep in cryo, only the 6 clones are awake and active.

So when they all awake, surrounded by their previous selves’ dead bodies they know they have a problem. Added to the murder issue they are all missing huge chunks of memory, and the ships’ data logs have been erased. They’ve lost years. How can they figure out who is responsible before the killer strikes again…

I’ll admit that when I first started reading it the jumps from one narrator to the next through me, I wasn’t sure what point of view I was supposed to be in. But after a chapter or two I got my head in the right space and was able to enjoy it much more. That may not be an issue for other people, and maybe it is because I wasn’t concentrating properly.

The characters have to get know one another all over again, they have no memory of the time they spent together, and as they are all criminals who took on the job in order to get a fresh start, none of them trust one another. They don’t know what the crimes that the others committed and so figuring out who might have a motive to murder them all is a tad on the difficult side.

I really enjoyed the book. It alternates between the characters past lives, the secrets they keep and the secrets they don’t even know they have, and the post-wake up timeline, so the reader gets to learn more about them all. As well as learning about the society that they come from. The problems it has, some of the issues that cloning has created as well as how society has attempted to solve these problems. It is a fascinating look at some of the questions that cloning brings about. It is immortality if one body dies? And if you believe in a soul then what happens that when your body dies but your mind lives on?

Is it right to correct your bodies imperfections for the next clone, and if so, who gets to decide what is an imperfection and what is a personality trait?

Lafferty manages to raise all these questions while telling and entertaining and intriguing story. It never gets bogged down in the ethics, but raises them in service of the story and the character, as good science fiction should.

[bookbrig-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really loved the characters and the clone stuff in this mystery. It's an interesting premise with a great crew, and it made for perfect vacation reading.

[weylyn42 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When all the crew of a legacy ship wake up as new clones missing the memories of the last 25 years and faced with evidence of their own murders, they must piece together what happened to them.

Distrust abounds, as the only thing they know about each other is that the crew is comprised of criminals, each promised a clean slate at their destination.

As the story unfolds, and the history of each crew member prior to launch is explored, it becomes clear that there is more there than first meets the eye.

Lafferty does an excellent job of mixing the pre-flight stories in with the tension of the post-murder crew, and the end brings it all together in a satisfying conclusion.

[kellswitch_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A space adventure set on a lone ship where the clones of a murdered crew must find their murderer -- before they kill again.

I am of two minds on this book, there were elements that I really enjoyed and found challenging and others that had me wanting to throw the book against the wall in frustration.

I loved the premise of the world and the rules behind the cloning technology that the author came up with here. It's not like any I've read before this.
I loved looking at how such cloning technology effected the culture, crime, and the legal system, the sense of self and community. It was fascinating and engaging and asked so many questions without feeling the need to answer them all or to justify why things work the way they do. This often frustrates me in books but here I appreciated it.

The frustration was when the characters were on the ship, the way the mystery unfolded, and the way the characters reacted and acted. It felt like one of those cases where the characters act stupid solely to progress the plot and I hate when that happens.

The world-building was excellent and felt real, the mystery started strong but kind of petered out halfway through and ended on a frustrating note, and the overall ending was a bit contrived but I did still find it satisfying.
An overall mixed bag of a book but I do hope the author continues to try such new ideas and to write more science fiction.

[daniel5estes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The worldbuilding in Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes is extraordinary in that the post-human cloning world is entirely believable. The politics, ethics and exponential incentives for misuse make the integration of successful human cloning a game changer.

The main narrative is an engrossing whodunit but it's the worldbuidling and backstory that makes the whole delightfully more than the sums of its parts.

[elenaj-147457 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had a couple of issues with this one. First, I find the premise (potential immortality through cloning) morally repugnant. Second, the writing style was not my cup of tea. It got better for me in the second half of the book, when the story picks up speed, but the first half is a lot of repetitive narration ('he looked in the mirror and saw how young he was' over and over) and mundane, unfunny banter.

The plot twists are pretty interesting and creative, and the ending was satisfying, but neither was enough to get me over my horror at the concept of "rebirth" into a cloned body.

[tinodidriksen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The premise and opening very strongly resemble the opening of Dark Matter. It's as if the author watched the show, was disappointed in the lackluster execution, and decided to write something better. That's not what the author did, but as someone who's wanted to do that, this book fulfills that desire. It's good, is what I am saying. Rating 5/5.

[xiaomarlo · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not for me. Very plot and narrative focused, but the characters didn't seem real to me and the world-building felt a bit tired. Too heavy-handed, IMO.

[aula_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book and I didn't... I loved the premise, the characters, and the set-up. I did not like the errors (e.g. two characters walk to the theatre to talk, but the next scene has them talking in one of the characters' sleeping quarters; at least twice the name of the character talking was the wrong one - i.e. Maria was said to be talking but it was actually Joanna). The entire book read as if it needed another good going through by an editor and then author: one draft short of being really good.

This all said, it was a book I that started and then read exclusively of the other books I was currently reading, which only happens when I'm truly captivated. The errors really bothered me, however... hence the 3 stars.

[santhony_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Science fiction has been around for a long time. As a result, it is rare that anything original can be found in new science fiction works. Faster than light travel, generation starships, artificial intelligence, cloning, colonization, alien intelligence are all well-developed science fiction tropes. So, in order to stand out, you either need to develop a twist on one or more of the above, or just write a better story.

The twist used in this novel involves a generation starship, manned by six clones, who through the technology of “mind-mapping” have achieved virtual immortality. Upon the death of a clone, a new, identical body is generated and all of the memories of the previous “shell” are implanted into the new clone.

In addition, all of the elements of a murder mystery are included in the novel, as it begins with the awakening of the clones to a scene of mass murder and mayhem. Not only have their predecessors been slaughtered, but their memories are not “up to date”, having reverted to the initiation of the journey, twenty years previous. As a result, they have no memory of anything that had occurred in the previous two decades. All of the ship’s logs have been erased and the ship’s artificial intelligence damaged. The ship is programmed to return to Earth and no one knows why.

While this certainly has elements of science fiction, the focus of the story is on the murder mystery and the psychological aspects of the suspects; there is little hard science fiction explained. The characters are well developed and the story advances steadily to its conclusion.

[clamairy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It was mostly a fun distracting read. I did enjoy the arguments & discussions on the ethics of cloning and gene tweaking, and whether cloned humans have souls. My main quibbles had to do with the science & SciFi bits. I can't understand why the author went to all of the trouble to set the book four centuries in the future, dream up and write about mind mapping technology & organic body printing capabilities, and then had the crew fighting with knives & guns.

[nkmunn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If there were ever a great SciFi take on a closed circle of suspects murder mystery, this is it!

[creighley_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A crew of clones awakens aboard a space ship to discover that they’re being hunted and any one of them might be the murderer. Maria Arena wakes up in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood. She has no recollection of her other life. Marie’s vat is one of seven. Each containing a clone of a crew member of their starship.

[liscarey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Maria Arena is one of the six crew members of the generation starship Dormire.

Like the other five crew members, she's a clone. Clones at this time have some specific rights, and some specific limitations on their rights, compared to non-clones, who are simply called "humans."

While waking up in a cloning vat isn't unusual, it is unusual to to wake up covered in blood, and to have no memory of how you died. It's even more unusual to discover you and four other members of the crew have been murdered, and the sixth crew member, the captain, is lying in the medical bay injured and in a coma. But her new clone has been awakened, too, making one of them an illegal copy.

They've been en route nearly twenty-five years, and the mind maps they presumably made in that interval have all been wiped. One of them is a murderer, and they have no idea which one or why, and they have no memories of the quarter century of time they've spent in space together and the events that may have led up to the crime.

After that, every additional piece of information they get makes things worse.

They have a cargo full of passengers in cryogenic storage, nearly two centuries to go in their journey to the world they're to colonize, and oh yes, it turns out they all have motives for murder, and criminal records that successful completion of this trip would have wiped out.

They aren't, as they were told, a crew carefully selected to be successful together.

And the ship's AI is turning them around, to head back to Earth, where they could all be executed.

Generation starship, clones, strong AI, and a murder mystery where everyone is a suspect.

Can they solve it before the return to Earth is irreversible? Or before whoever the killer is does it again?

It's a very character-driven story with the sf elements, cloning, AI, and centuries-long star travel, all essential to the plot. All the characters are flawed; they've all done bad things in their past. And they all have real strengths.

Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved the plot and the characters, but something about the prose just rubbed me the wrong way.