Olivia Waite, accomplished Romance novelist and editor for the New York Times Book Review, has taken a foray into cozy science fiction. I tripped over her newest book, a novella really, from Tor, Murder by Memory in a Reddit forum about the Next Big Thing in sff, and picked up the book as a lark.
It’s not a heavy philosophical read, which is perfect for the heavy times in which we live. It’s more a case of Miss Marple in space, with restrained touches of Romance, and a quick fun read, nicely packed and entertaining to boot.
Dorothy Gentleman is a ship’s detective aboard the Fairweather, an interstellar craft bound for...somewhere. On the Fairweather, a person’s consciousness is recorded in the library and housed safely there. People who are currently alive can update their volumes to include whatever’s happened since their last update, and people who die can either rest safely in the library or be downloaded into a blank body to live a lifetime before being returned to the library and revived:
Everyone on the Fairweather had a book and a body; the Library held a copy of your mind in the one while you walked around in the other.
Dorothy is supposed to be resting in the Library. Ferry, the Fairweather’s computer — something of the Enterprise’s computer with a better personality — checks in routinely and asks the mind in the book if they’re ready to be decanted into a body, and Dorothy has decided to rest for a good while; solving mysteries is tiresome work. So imagine her surprise when she’s rudely awakened — oh wait, you don’t have to imagine. You can read the first couple of paragraphs:
Near the topmost deck, in a small lift with glass walls and flickering buttons, I, Dorothy Gentleman, ship’s detective, opened a air of eyes and licked a pair of lips and awoke in a body that wasn’t mine.
It was the nails that first tipped me off. Blank bodies were just that: blank. My nails ought to have been the same color as the skin beneath — in my case, somewhere in a range of pinks, tending to florid.
Not silver, and not shaped.
This body was already inhabited.
My skin — someone’s skin — broke out in gooseflesh. Of course every human body was a horrifying collection of juices and tissues, acids and effluvia poured into a bag with a bunch of long rocks, a shambling accident of biology that made its own mysterious and often frustrating decisions without reference to the mind. They were disgusting miracles, every one.
— page 1
There’s a lot going on here: one of the essential qualities of long-term interspace travel (and so far the Fairweather has been en route for 300 years) is the dissociation of mind and body. In this case, minds are protected and housed in the library while the bodies are entirely dispensable, to the point where Dorothy can consider a human body a “horrifying collection of juices and tissues.” It’s the mind that’s important — if a person is killed or dies or...whatever — their mind can be dropped into a blank body and life goes on. It’s foolproof; as long as the library remains intact, everyone’s consciousness is safe.
Guess what? You’re not supposed to wake up in someone else’s body. Dorothy, no stranger to unraveling mysteries, is unused to a mystery with existential stakes, as in, people are murdered and their consciousnesses fried. Dorothy isn’t even sure whose body she’s in, and why she wakes in the middle of a magnetic storm, with Ferry, the Fairweather’s computer, on something of a bender, with her own book erased.
Figuring out what’s happening, whose murderous plan has been enacted and why she’s in the middle of it, makes for a twisty plot, a brilliant but dizzy programmer of a nephew, a striking love interest, a passion for knitting, and the concoction of memory cocktails — not alcoholic but bits of earthly experience in fluid form.
Murder by Memory is the first of a series, with hints of deeper mysteries embedded throughout with promises to make this compact read at least the first of a few. It’s not deep, it’s not heavy, but it is fun, and that’s a welcome thing — a nice puzzle to solve on a rainy afternoon, in space or on earth.
