Mysterious Clones: Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty is a well-constructed mystery narrative set aboard a spaceship with clones, mind mapping, and heavy doses of personal identity thought experiments.  It's not perfect, but I really enjoyed it.

Lafferty's biggest accomplishment is a carefully and intricately constructed plot.  The basic idea: several clones awaken with their previous clones having been murdered and nobody (not even the ship's AI) remembers what happened.  We learn enough to keep the mystery going exactly when we need to learn it.  People who are more fans of traditional mystery novels rather than science fiction might even appreciate this book for its structure alone.


But fans of science fiction will find plenty to love, too.  The idea of clones given the memories of their previous clone is nothing all that new in SF, but it's fun to see what Lafferty does with the concept, especially the ideas of how such memories might be edited/hacked.  And the AI creates a bit of a surprise, too, that I don't want to spoil.

There's plenty of good philosophical SF to chew on in this novel.  Are the clones really the same person as their previous clone?  Or are they illicit copies?  Do they have souls?  What is a soul, anyway?  What if two clones of the same person are alive at the same time?  Which one is the real person?


Hugo Dreams and the Philosophy Report

This is a Hugo finalist for best novel this year (which reminds me that I'm headed to Worldcon again this year!).  While I liked the novel, I don't think it will be my top pick for three reasons.  First, the plot is a bit too intricate at times: I admit to having a little bit of trouble keeping track of who's who, but maybe that's because I read most of the novel while I was tired on some long plane rides (on my recent trip to Europe).  Second, I like to see the Hugo go to SF works that are groundbreaking in some way, and while this is a well-crafted novel, it's hard to say it's breaking much ground.

Lastly, the novel raises great philosophical questions, but hardly delves into them.  It seems to be assumed that whether a person is the same person as their clone is only an issue for religious people who believe in immaterial souls, but the fact that personal identity is an issue for Buddhists who explicitly deny any such thing as a self as well as plenty of hard-nosed analytic philosophers who reject the supernatural all together shows that issues of personal identity are thorny for everyone whether you believe in immaterial souls or not.

I don't hold this against Lafferty, since she's writing a novel and not a professional philosophical treatise, but still, I would've liked to see the issue get a little more treatment.  [For the record, I do think the clones are the same person as the previous clones, but only because I tend to agree with some Buddhist philosophers (Vasubandhu, etc.) and some analytic philosophers (Derek Parfit, etc.) that there is strictly speaking no such thing as a person or a self and that we identify the "same" person as a matter of causal continuity and social conventions rather than the persistence of any one thing like a soul or self.]


Rating: 90/100

See also my Goodreads review