Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

I still have two of the novels nominated for the Best Novel Hugo this year to read, but at the moment, with four under my belt, this one is in the lead. I'm using as my general marker for sorting out my order "books I told other people about the most" - providing, of course, that I wasn't swearing about them. Six Wakes by far tops that list, and as much as I enjoyed all the books in this category I've read so far, it is my frontrunner. Subject, of course, to my impressions of the last two books I haven't read.

I am kind of a sucker for a good murder mystery set in a science fiction or fantasy setting, and if you pair that with a new twist on cloning and the reactions of humans to this kind of cloning, and characters with lots of depth and secrets to hide? Sister, I am IN.  It does not hurt that I thoroughly enjoyed the writing, the story, the people on the pages...I'd be hard-pressed to say something I didn't like about this book.

So, let's talk about it!  Six Wakes starts off with a hell of a bang. Clones are supposed to wake up with all of the memories of their former bodies (this is cloning as a form of longevity, even immortality), and will never see the old and discarded versions of themselves. So, on a long-haul spaceship, the first-ever colony ship, crewed by six clones, it is a shock to wake up with no memories of the past twenty years, and the murdered bodies of their former versions lying on the floor (mostly) of the cloning bay.

One of them is a murderer, but no one remembers the past twenty years, so they have little idea of what might have transpired to bring someone to the point of mass murder. To make things more complicated, one clone died of suicide (apparently a non-reclonable offense, usually), several from trauma from sharp objects and blunt force, and one from...hemlock?

Also, the ship's AI, Ian, has been largely disabled and the ship seems to be turning around to go back to Earth - somewhere none of the clones wants to go, since they were all (or were all supposed to be) criminals who commuted their sentences by going on this one-way trip to a new planet.

Phew! We dive right in! From there, we dance around and through the mystery, with diversions back to the past to show how each character ended up where they were, and what that might tell us about the overall murder mystery. At the same time, and this is truly impressive, we get a larger sense of the uses and abuses of clones back on Earth, the ways in which the cloned and uncloned regard cloning, and the political machinations that led to certain limitations on cloning, as well as the blackmarket that has sprung into being to break those laws.

The backstories seem quite separate at first, but begin to intersect in ways that the characters weren't expecting any more than the readers were. This is delightfully twisty, and when connections are revealed, they are satisfying and tie the whole story together more strongly, rather than trying to throw an out-of-left-field reveal in to change everything at the end. I know which kind of surprise I prefer more, and it's the kind Mur Lafferty is pulling off here, the one that makes me go "Oh, of course" because it fits so perfectly.

It is what she's doing with the underlying ideas, and how she's acting them out through the bodies of the characters that really elevates this book above and beyond. As a murder mystery, it's really strong. But it's added more to that, and that makes this a strong contender for the top of my ballot this year.