Review: Murder by Memory

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This "cosy" SF mystery is set aboard a generation ship, the Fairweather. The protagonist, ship's detective Dorothy Gentleman, is abruptly awakened in a body not her own, and has to solve a murder. Unfortunately, the body her mind has been uploaded into is one Gloria Vowell, who proves to be the prime suspect.

This book could have been better, but the setting, worldbuilding and characterization is, as the saying goes, a "mile wide and an inch deep." Thin and shallow, in other words. The very real and potentially life-threatening problems of life on board a generation ship are not even touched on, and the ramifications of a technology where people's brains are mapped into "memory-books" for uploading when their current bodies wear out, thus making them functionally immortal, are similarly ignored. The Fairweather, or Ferry, as she is known, has a shipboard culture that appears to be both socialist and capitalist at the same time? which makes for some uneasy bedfellows, to say the least. (In fact, the latter is the villain's motivation for the murders, as she works a centuries-long financial grift whereby she loans people money, murders them, and gains untraceable interest on the loans during the time period until they are decanted into new bodies. It's not like they're gone forever, after all! They come back!)

Yeah, that....doesn't make a whole lot of sense. She may gain a fortune, but what's she going to do with it when they reach their destined colony planet in seven or so centuries? It's not like those extra dollars are going to do her much good, light-years away from Earth while the ship and its inhabitants fight to terraform their new world.

This may be the result of the story's 100-page novella length: the pacing is tight, and some of these things needed more time and space to breathe. Still, at the end I wasn't very fond of either Dorothy Gentleman or her ship.

There are better generation ship stories around, and much better mysteries. (See: either one of Robert Jackson Bennett's Shadow of the Leviathan fantasy-mysteries, The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption. ) This one, I think, can be safely passed over.

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