Mur Lafferty Archives – Carol's Notebook

Author: Mur Lafferty

Mur Lafferty is the author of Six Wakes and The Shambling Guides series from Orbit books, as well as several self pubbed novels and novellas, including the award winning Afterlife series. She is the host of podcasts I Should Be Writing and Ditch Diggers. She is the recipient of the John Campbell Award for best new writer, the Manly Wade Wellman Award, and joined the Podcast Hall of Fame in its inaugural year.

Six Wakes is one I picked up based on the blurb - a locked-room mystery in space, a sci-fi mystery. The sci-fi hook this time around was cloning. The laws around cloning are strict, but basically, we have figured out how to make mindmaps, putting all of a person's memories, thoughts, personalities into a code that can be transferred into that person's cloned body, making an individual practically immortal and able to inherit their own belongings/money. There's some philosophical discussion about what makes a person a person, what is a soul, etc., but it's not really dealt with in depth. The mystery set up is great. Six people wake up in fresh clone bodies, with the clear evidence that their previous bodies had been murdered, obviously by one of them, since everyone else on the generational ship is in "storage." One or more of them is the killer, but no one knows who - their memories from the last 25 years have...