Six Wakes - Mur Lafferty

⭐ 9.0/10

(Originally written by Magdalene)

This is one of my favourite sci-fi books I've read in a while (other than MurderBot, of course!) and was lots of fun. It's a murder mystery, except in space! In the future clones are normal and a common way to extend your lifespan, where your mind map gets saved constantly, and as soon as your current self dies, a clone of yourself at 20 years old and with all of your memories wakes up. The book starts with the clones of the six crew members of a space ship all waking up at the same time... with their previous bodies dead and obviously murdered lying around them, and none of them have memories of the past 25 years. Also all of them are past criminals, but they don't know what the others did. It's a locked room mystery because one of them had to be the murderer, but can you really be blamed for murdering people if it was a clone version of yourself who did it?

What a cool concept! So everyone is trying to find out how everyone died, and they don't know who to trust because they've just met each other. Also, maybe it was themselves? Slowly you get to know them and their pasts, and how they all ended up on this space ship. I was invested the whole way through. There was also just a lot of fascinating cloning ethics involved, and questions of the value of life, and what we're all capable of.