Tag: Mur Lafferty

First Impressions: Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

I’ve long been a fan of Mur Lafftery’s work as a podcaster (I Should Be Writing and the Hugo-winning Ditch Diggers) and editor (I mean, heck, she was one of the first to buy a short story from me), but, until now, I haven’t been exposed to any of her fiction. Six Wakes, her first science fiction novel, earned a lot of raves this year, and ended up being nominated for some prominent SFF awards, has been on my to-read pile for several months. After finishing off Peter Frankopan’s tremendous (and tremendously heavy) The Silk Roads, I needed a palate cleanser, and Six Wakes seemed like the perfect thing. A generation ship story AND a closed room murder mystery? Sign me up.

I’m listening to the audiobook, and the first pleasent surprise is that Lafferty herself is doing the narration. She’s not as dramatic as some narrators, choosing instead to let the text itself do the speaking, but her experience is obvious and her authorial voice brings forward an interesting perspective on the story. 

And what a story it is. Things come together quickly, as the cloned members of a generation ship wake to find their previous bodies brutally murdered. Lafferty’s prose is whip sharp, and she relies on natural, well-paced dialogue to move the story along. I’m about 20% into the book, and at this point the handful of main protagonists have already established personalities and separate themselves from one another easily. Its pace, coupled with a high number of characters, and a mystery plot, could easily have made for a huge mess, but Lafferty handles things with ease. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Agatha Christie’s famous, And Then There Were None. The conceit that all but one of the principal crew members on the ship is a former criminal partaking in the mission with the promise of a full pardon adds to the Christie-like air. It’s immensely compelling, especially as the secrets of their pasts are slowly revealed. Mystery and suspicion abounds as each of the characters tries to juggle uncertainty with the need to trust their fellow travellers.

In all, I’m hooked. The mystery is compelling, the characters are rich, the pacing is breakneck. I gotta know what happens next.