Rollback by Robert Sawyer

It's been over a week since I finished this book, which is definitely going to slightly change how this review will come out. If I'd written it as soon as I had finished, this would likely be a lot more ranty, and I am still annoyed, but the anger has lost its heat. It's too bad, because I was pretty worked up about this book, and, in particular, how it treats the female characters and what story it centers and how it's a retread of a theme that has come up in other Sawyer works but does nothing new with it. Oh wait, maybe the anger is coming back. I've reached the level of annoyance, anyway.

What bothered me right away is something that I couldn't quite put my finger on, until I was discussing it with my husband, and he said that in one of his creative writing courses, the prof had given some advice he'd taken to heart. To wit: "the story should be about the person with the most at stake."  Which is damned good advice, and it explains why I've been annoyed with a few other books as well.

So let's look at the story and see who has the most at stake here. The main characters are Don and Sarah, who are in their late eighties, at the age where they don't know if they'll be around in a year or two. They celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary just as exciting news breaks - forty years earlier, roughly, a message had been received from a nearby star system. Sarah was the one who cracked the code and discovered the message the first time.

The new message is encrypted in a different way, and a billionaire offers to pay for a rejuvenation therapy for Sarah so that she can try to solve this puzzle too. She agrees, but only if Don gets the treatment as well. Unfortunately, the treatment takes for Don, but not for Sarah, so he returns to being biologically about 25, which she remains 87, and with the greatest puzzle of her professional career in front of her.

So, who has more at stake? The woman who has to face her own mortality in a fresh and cruel way while her husband will live for decades more, and still has to figure out what the aliens sent and why and for whom? Or the husband, who was to deal with his wife continuing to grow older, the difficulties of appearing young but being old, and whether or not he'll fall dick first into a comely grad student? (Spoiler alert: he does.)

(Also bothering me is that this is no less than the third book by Sawyer that has the same plotline of a man discovering he'll outlive his wife by many, many years. It's more fully developed here, but Sawyer, we've done this before, as we've done the man irresistibly attracted to an intelligent young woman who reminds the protagonist of his wife when she was younger. Can we find a few new tricks?)

And of course the beautiful young grad student that Don cheats on his wife with falls for him fully, so fully that while she's pissed when she finds out he's actually 87, married, and worse, married to her academic idol, she takes him back.

You know what would have been more interesting? If Don and Sarah had had an honest and painful discussion about vastly unmatched sex drives when one spouse is biologically 25 and the other is 87 and come to some sort of agreement. You know what isn't interesting? Sarah being a saint and not having any real problem (shown, anyway) with the treatment failing or Don fucking around on her. You know what? She'd be justified in being mad.

Knowing your wife's going to die and you are still young, that's a story. But when you add in the SF angle of this book, the SETI message, then this is definitely a story where Sarah has the most at stake, and neither she nor the grad student are afforded much depth or any ability to be really mad at Don. This is his story, and it's frustrating, because it's far from the most interesting part of the book, and the reaction of the women to him is frankly eyebrow-raising, if not outright unbelievable.