~It wasn't a cage if it kept moving. It wasn't a prison if we could go anywhere.~

The Writing and Worldbuilding

The writing style was very unique, so interwoven with Sunday's own voice that it felt like someone speaking to you a lot of the time (besides the science rants that really put the "science" in "science fiction"). Because of the science-y parts, I found the book actually quite difficult to get through, though the story did intrigue me. The climax was really great, especially because of all the build-up toward it. The ending, however, was very unresolved and just a little too open-ended for me. In other words, there was no clear conclusion and I was just left confused.

I feel like some aspects of this would have been better told as a film, namely characters. There were so many names being thrown around, and especially after science rants, I found myself having cleared all my name caches to make room for theoretical physics and quantum mechanics or whatever, and not knowing who the heck anyone was other than Sunday (obviously), Chimp, and Lian. If this was a film, then visuals would have played a huge role in helping me know who's who. This book gave basically zero physical descriptions, so all I had to go by was names.

I loved the themes and the grey morality of Chimp, though it was nothing I haven't seen before.

~"I want to see how it turns out."

"It."

"Everything. The universe. This--reality. This hologram, this model, whatever we're in. It had a start, it's got an endpoint, and the closer we get to it the clearer it becomes. If we just hang in there long enough we'll at least get to see the outlines."

"You want to know the purpose of existence?"

"I want to know the destination of existence. Anything less is selling out."~

The Characters

Sunday: She was sassy and interesting, but I got the sense that nothing really mattered from her. If she had died and another character took her place, I really wouldn't have cared tbh.

Chimp: I loved Chimp! He was honestly such an intriguing AI because he isn't a genius, and he has these almost human qualities to him that made him really interesting to read.

Lian: I liked her at first, but as it went on, she really started to piss me off.

All the people I constantly forgot existed: Well, they were background for the most part and when they weren't supposed to be background, I just got confused.

Conclusion

It was a very interesting read, and overall, I enjoyed it, but I'm unlikely to read anything else in this series (it's part of a series btw lol though you don't necessarily have to read it in order) or maybe even by this author. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone only used to reading YA, but people who already understand and enjoy hard sci-fi might really enjoy this.

Throw-you-in-the-deep-end hard science-fi that manages to accomplish a lot in its minuscule page count. The Freeze-Frame Revolution takes what some may consider a pessimistic approach to human nature and the future, but I think it is more like a realist one. The ship itself--and it's AI--may just be the most interesting character.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution is a story of revolution aboard a space ship tasked with traversing the galaxy building warp gates. In order to keep building for as long as possible the humans aboard are cryogenically frozen between builds, waking only when absolutely necessary. But not everything is as it seems.

The story is faced paced, partially due to the first person point of view. The main character is Sunday Ahzmundin, one of the crew aboard the Eriophora, a ship run by an AI called CHIMP. Sunday is CHIMP’s favorite human aboard, someone he’ll wake from cryostasis for support on builds or whatever else needs attention.

This isn’t the sort of revolutionary story with space battles and high octane action. The story is quieter than that. It’s a quiet, smart tale. Characters are faced with enormous odds. They are only awake once every hundred thousand years, usually more. There’s no choice on when they’ll be awake or who’s going to be on duty at the same time. Sunday and her fellow conspirators are left with using clever means of communication. Sheet music, dungeons and dragons (or the far future’s equivalent) are used in code.

Time is used very interestingly here. It is certainly not something that’s on Sunday’s side. There is a feeling of not having enough time to stage this revolution, but at the same time there is this almost oppressive feeling of eternity. These people have been traveling for literal eons and they are utterly alone.

The ship and its crew is very much alone. A bleak picture is painted as the ship travels through the universe. They are alone, waiting for orders that never arrive, waiting for a futuristic humans – or whatever they evolve into – to save them from their lonely journey with no word on how the human race has fared since the ship left earth. There is a real air of uncertainty here. All Sunday and the others have to rely on are their intellects.

It was very refreshing to have a main character who is clever and is surrounded by clever people. Yes, she doesn’t always make the right choices. Sunday is a complex character, one with very relatable, very human emotions. I liked reading from her point of view a lot.

If, like me, you found the world this book was set in fascinating, you’re in luck. The Free-Frame Revolution is part of a series of stories all set in the same universe. The other stories in the Sunflower Cycle can be found on author Peter Watts’s website. Reading these other works first isn’t necessary to understanding this novella. However, if you’d prefer some greater context in regards to world building you might want to read these first.

4.5 stars

For over 60 million years, Sunday has been part of a crew laying a super-mega-highway around the Milky Way. She wakes up for a day or two, then sleeps for hundreds, thousands of years. Sometimes she doesn't see her friends for a million years. It's a hard way to plan a revolution.

I'm genuinely conflicted about this book. On the one hand, I absolutely loved it (what I could understand, at least), and on the other—holy moly this puts the hard into hard sci-fi. There's the mind-shattering concept of a mission that's been going on as long as the dinosaurs have been extinct, black-hole drives, singularities, a crazy-rational AI, wormhole building, etc., etc., etc...that my pea-brain couldn't handle until I called it magic. Take that, Clarke.

It is amazing, and raises up lots of questions, particularly about missions that turn into never-ending journeys (I mean seriously Mission Control—who thought it was a good idea to keep the kill switch on Earth? Really? That's like, 99% of the main problem of the book. If you're waiting for an end signal that'll never come because who knows what happened to the main planners, then you're going to go on forever or until Heat Death), control, genetically engineered humans, and what happens after you end your life's mission.

And there was some awesome diversity casually thrown into the storyline (because it's the future, and no one has hang-ups over gender or sexual orientation or ethnicity).

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review.

I really wanted to like The Freeze-Frame Revolution more than I actually did, but in the end it was just too far into hard sci-fi territory for me.

The concept is clever -- a ship filled with 30 000 or so crew members is on a long-term mission to build wormhole bridges throughout the universe. And by long-term, I'm not kidding! We're talking 65 million years (so far!) here. Each crew member is kept in deep freeze most of the time, with brief few-day periods of being thawed to assist the ship's AI with more complicated builds. Which crew members are thawed each time varies, resulting in icy slumbers lasting hundreds or thousands of years at a time.

Except not everything is going as smoothly as the crew assumes. And how do you get to the bottom of the truth when you're only awake for a few days at a time, and the people you're awake with are constantly changing?

If you're a fan of hard sci-fi, then this book might appeal to you more than it did me. I didn't realize until I'd finished that this novella is part of a series, but I'm not sure if reading the other parts would have helped this to make more sense to me -- it took me a long time to figure out what the heck was going on, and even once I did, I felt very bogged down by all the tech description.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tachyon Publications for providing me with a free electronic ARC of this book.

Ahoy there me mateys! I received this sci-fi eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. So here be me honest musings . . .

the freeze frame revolution (Peter Watts)
Title: the freeze frame revolution
Author: Peter Watts
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Publication Date: TODAY!!! (paperback/e-book)
ISBN: 978-1616962524
Source: NetGalley

This book was a bit of a stretch for me given that it is more hard sci-fi and physics is not me friend. At all. But I have always heard wonderful things about this author and the premise was too awesome not to give it a shot. And I be very glad I did.

So basically this story is told from the perspective of Sunday Ahzmundin. She is a human crew member aboard a ship named the Eriophora which is on the mission to create wormhole gates across the universe. The crew expected their task to end and to be called back to rejoin the rest of humanity. Except they are still onboard over 60 million years later. So what is really going on?

AI runs this ship and at the heart of the story is the relationship between Sunday and the AI who they call Chimp. Ye see the crew is only taken out of stasis when the AI thinks they are necessary to the mission. This usually is a handful of days at a time every 10,000 years or so. And of course there is a rotation so only a small handful of anywhere from 1 to 15 get thawed out at a time. Some of the humans want to revolt against the AI and the mission given the circumstances. Should Sunday join them? And if so how can a hostile takeover succeed under the conditions imposed by Chimp?

I absolutely adored this (longer) novella. I thought the premise, writing, characters, and ship were awesome. Sunday's inner conflict was fascinating as was her reasons behind the choices she makes. I gobbled this up and was completely engrossed. The only flaw was that the ending happened and I just don't get it. Despite multiple readings. Those couple pages confused the heck out of me. But I thought that perhaps I just missed some crucial point. Well perhaps I did.

Side note: Claudia @ goodreads' review (which is excellent) did explain just a wee bit. As she says:

"First of all, this novella is not meant to be read on its own. Could be regarded as a standalone, but you’ll feel like something is missing. And that’s because it’s part of a series of stories, entitled the Sunflowercycle, which includes three more short ones (so far).*

Publication order is: The Island (2009) - Winner of Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2010, Hotshot (2014), Giants (2014) and The Freeze-Frame Revolution (June 2018).

Now, after reading all, my advice is they are to be read in this order: Hotshot, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, The Island, Giants. It will not answer all your questions, but it will bring some light into this universe and its perpetual travelers . . .

* all three available on the author’[s] site: http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm"

So while the crazy ending hurt me brain and made me feel like I was missing something, I loved the story and circumstances enough to go back and read the other stories. I even think I will follow Claudia's readin' order. So seriously even if physics intimidates yer noggin', do give this story a chance. I certainly don't regret a thing!

So lastly . . .
Thank you Tachyon Publications!

Goodreads' website has this to say about the novella:

She believed in the mission with all her heart.
But that was sixty million years ago.

How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what best for you?

Sunday Ahzmundin is about to find out.

To visit the author’s website go to:
Peter Watts - Author

To buy the novel go to:
the freeze frame revolution - Book

To add to Goodreads go to:
Yer Ports for Plunder List

Intense as a standalone, though part of a larger body. Hard Science fiction, exquisitely character driven, and very interesting / unique journey. Could not put it down until it was completed. Still need to digest the ending, so I am without doubt reading the rest of the Sunflower cycle to give it a new spin.

4.5 rounded up to 5 (Rating is for the entire Sunflower Cycle series so far)

I’ve held off reviewing this for some time now. Once I finished reading it, I just couldn’t fully wrap my head around what I had just read. In attempting to understand the story better, I went and looked at some other reviews of people who enjoyed the story to hopefully gather some details I may have missed. I’m so glad I did that because I found this great review by Claudia - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., where she explains this is part of a larger set of stories called the Sunflower Cycle. Turned out there were 3 other stories in that world and they all kind of go together. Based on Claudia’s recommendation, I went and read the other 3, in the order she advised (Hotshot, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, The Island, and Giants), to get a better sense of the story and the world as a whole that Peter Watts created.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution is essentially about a seriously long-term revolution going on aboard the spaceship, Eriophora. The job of the crew, also known as spores, and the on-board AI, whom everyone refers to as “Chimp”, is to build a web of wormholesque gates throughought space in a spiral moving outwards from Earth and out into the great beyond of unknown space. This way humans can hopefully succeed at interstellar travel and find another home as Earth’s resources are greatly depleted and humanity will not survive if they don’t find another planet.

At this point in the Sunflower Cycle story arch, they have been travelling for essentially millions of years as they jump through space. Every spore onboard has been raised specifically for this mission, and because they need to be alive in case anything happens, the onboard AI runs the day-to-day of the ship, and each spore is only awake for about a week at a time out of a thousand years.

Some on the ship are starting to question the mission, as well as the intentions of the AI. Thus, we have mutiny aboard the ship as the people decide they want to overthrow the onboard AI. But staging a coup is a little difficult when you’re only awake for a week out of a thousand years at a time, and typically not awake with the same people. Musical scores and D&D manuals assist the main character, Sunday, and her fellow friends and crewmates as they plan a coup a millennia in the making.

I’m so glad that I went and read the other 3 stories before deciding on a final rating and review for this book. Peter Watts has created an exceptionally strange, surreal, but wholly sci-fi world that totally drew me in and had me wanting more. If you decide to go into this adventure know you will never get all your questions answered, and some things will never be fully explained. He also doesn’t write easy to read sci-fi. If you like your sci-fi to be well explained and fluid, you’re looking in the wrong corner. If you like hard-core sci-fi on a massive scale with lots of psychology and character-centered plot, you need this, and the other 3 companion stories available for free on the author’s website: http://www.rifters.com/real/author.htm.

I’ve already started blog stalking Peter Watts to add more of his stories to my Kindle.

Received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts is a long novella — or a short novel, according to comments in the back-matter — about people on a very long-haul space flight that they mostly spend cryogenically frozen. The title comes from the idea of staging a revolution in short snippets over long periods of time. (Very long periods of time: the story opens about 65 million Earth-years after the journey started.)

She believed in the mission with all her heart. But that was sixty million years ago.

How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what best for you?

Sunday Ahzmundin is about to find out.

This book caught my eye because of the premise and because I’ve been in a science fiction mood for a while now. I haven’t read more than short fiction by Watts before (a long time ago when something was shortlisted for a Hugo, I think), so why not give this a try? In the end, though, I didn’t love it. It wasn’t a terrible book but, for me, it didn’t live up to the expectations set by the premise.

First off, it remains a great premise. The purpose of the long haul flight and one-way ticket to the future is to build Star Gates (not actually infringing copyright by being called that) around the galaxy for humanity to, later, be able to get around faster. The ship (actually a flying asteroid with a built in singularity generator) has to travel at sub-light speeds to set up the future FTL highway. The people on the mission know they can never go home and are brought out of stasis mainly for more complicated situations that the AI can’t be trusted to handle alone.

So far, so interesting. Where it fell down for me was in the balance between the science and the tech in the writing, and a bit in the characterisation. Near the start, I thought that the science was the most interesting aspect but we mostly got a bunch of characterisation. Near the end, when the human aspect was more interesting, there was more of a focus on the cool science (I'm being vague to avoid spoilers). Some of the meh could have been avoided by writing slightly more interesting characters. I found them all a bit bland, even the ones that were supposed to be interesting. I didn't feel very invested in the narrator, Sunday, even though she was overwhelmingly the character we got to know best. (I was also pretty surprised when a pronoun identified her as female a quarter of the way into the book, so, hmm.)

This isn't a bad book and if the blurb grabs you, you could do worse. But for me it was a disappointment because I had hoped for more. I was left with a feeling of somewhat wasted potential and I don't think I'll be bothering to seek out more Watts books. I'm glad I gave it a shot, though.

3.5 / 5 stars

First published: June 2018, Tachyon Publications
Series: Maybe? Looks like there are related short stories (thanks Goodreads), but I'm not sure how they're related.
Format read: ePub ARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley

Published by Tachyon Publications on June 12, 2018

Everyone who has seen 2001: A Space Odyssey knows that it is unwise to put an Artificial Intelligence in charge of a spaceship. The time will eventually come when humans need to plot against the computer. The Freeze Frame Revolution asks how that might be done when humans are mostly in stasis, with only a few at a time awakened every few centuries to help the computer build gates across the galaxy, connecting wormholes so that future travelers will journey on interstellar freeways.

Thirty thousand explorers on a sizeable ship have been building those gates for 65 million years. They don’t know if Earth still exists. If it does, it isn’t the Earth they knew. Every now and then, a monster pops out of a gate they’ve built, perhaps trying to eat them, but they’re moving too fast to be devoured. So far, anyway.

Lian Wei is fed up with the monsters, but more than that, she’s fed up with her life. She knows that the explorers were engineered for longevity, to withstand thousands of years of sleep at a time, to be happy simulating the lives of humans long dead. She wants freedom in the form of self-determination. She wants her life experiences to be real. She thinks messing up the AI’s confidence algorithms, making it more dependent on its human crew, might give her what she wants. The ship has other ideas.

Lian confides in Sunday Ahzmundin, believing she might be of like mind. She’s not, at least initially. Thousands of years later, Sunday learns that other members of the crew have similar notions of freedom. Eventually feeling motivated to explore the vast ship, Sunday discovers a hidden chamber that leads to a revelation about the ship’s interaction with humans. Suddenly the question becomes: How does one plot a revolution against an AI that sees and hears everything, when the opportunity to interact with other humans only comes along once every few centuries, and when it’s unlikely that the same conspiring humans will be awakened at the same time? And more importantly (to Sunday, at least), how do you fight against the real enemy, mission planners who have been dead for scores of millions of years?

The Freeze Frame Revolution is hard science fiction, which I generally like, but maybe a little too hard for me, given that I’m not a scientist. I struggled with the nuts-and-bolts of the story, and while that’s my weakness, not the author’s, I had more fun reading Watts’ Echopraxia, which I found to be more accessible. In any event, the central plot doesn’t require a perfect understanding of the ship’s interaction with the universe or of the physics that underlie the crew’s conspiracy against the AI.

The plot moves the “evil AI” story in a new direction by assuming that an AI on a long-term mission won’t necessarily be all that smart, because machines are more likely to stay on track if they’re a bit limited and unimaginative (hence the need for a human crew). But even an Artificial Intelligence might turn out to be surprisingly intelligent, and as sf and mainstream writers alike have long noted, intelligence (artificial or otherwise) can’t be trusted.

As Sunday narrates the novel, she sometimes speaks directly to an audience. Guessing the identity of the audience she’s addressing is one of the novel’s many challenges.

Good science fiction, like all good literature, tells us something about the human condition. The Freeze Frame Revolution offers insights into how different personalities might respond to long but condensed lifespans spent under the watchful eye of a controlling computer, while at the same time asking how humanity might change when a cohort of humans, perhaps the last humans alive, are on a seemingly endless journey together.

RECOMMENDED

This new novella by Peter Watts is part of a series of stories he has been writing, on and off, for some time now. The series seems to be called Sunflowers. The other stories to date (Hotshot, The Island, and Giants) are available for free download from the author's website: .
The basic idea is this: a group of human beings live and work on a spaceship that is circling the galaxy, at a substantial fraction of light speed, in order to create wormholes - so that future spaceships from Earth will be able to move from star system to star system quickly and easily. The thousands of people on the ship spend most of their time in cryogenic suspension, without aging, as the ship takes millions of years to traverse the galaxy. An onboard artificial intelligence runs things, and only awakens a few of the human beings or brief periods when it encounters situations that are too difficult for it to deal with by itself (mostly when they actually need to install a wormhole).
It quickly becomes absurd: the narrator, Sunny, has only had a few years in toto alive, awake, and ageing, while the ship as a whole has been traveling for something like 55 million years. Nobody knows what has happened on Earth in that vast stretch of time, nor even whether human beings (or their evolutionarily changed descendents) still exist.
Each story explores a different aspect of this dilemma. The Freeze Frame Revolution deals with the relations between the crew and the AI (which they call The Chimp, because of its supposedly limited intelligence - which has been deliberately limited so that it will not come off as superior to the living human beings aboard). Crew members have reason to believe that The Chimp has been lying to them and manipulating them, and they want to put a stop to it. This entails plotting to take over the ship from the AI - the conspiracy takes millennia of actual time to unfold, because nobody is awake for more than a week or so at a time, and only a small portion of the crew is awake at any particular time - they need to send messages to one another which endure over the long hibernation period, and which the AI is unable to read (or even to be aware of the existence of). It is difficult, but they manage to do it -up to a point. The novella is a somber one, because it deals with a situation in which ostensibly free people do not actually have much of a choice, or much room to maneuver, and where the challenge of dealing with the essentially nonhuman intelligence like the AI is a difficult and perhaps impossible one. The book, like all of Watts' fiction, is intense, intellectually intriguing, and very skeptical about long-range human prospects.

My problem with this book is that it's apparently part of a larger tale built up with other stories available on his website (thanks, Goodreads!). My other problem with it is, oh my goodness, so bleak. And so complex. Not that complexity is a bad thing (especially with scifi). The problem comes when the author is more concerned with tone, worldbuilding, and getting the science right that they neglect the story. The synopsis for this book (novella?) implied a good plot, which was technically there... but the human characters seemed added as an afterthought. I didn't care about any of them because they never came close to feeling real to me. The end result was a feeling of having a really smart guy tell me a "what if" scenario about some science he knew pretty well, and he threw in a story for dummies like me who would be lost otherwise.

A 65 million year mission ran almost entirely by AI with a random selection of human crew woken up every 1000 years to check up on it - but what if the mission starts to go wrong? How do you stage a mutiny when you are only awake one day in a thousand years, when the handful of people you wake up with are chosen by the AI and the AI watches every move from your own eyes?

The premise of Freeze Frame Revolution is one that greatly intrigued me to pick it up, kept me interested whilst reading and stayed with me long after I had finished it. The story explores humanity thriving in an environment where a mission they fully believed in may now be obsolete and where they have to trust an AI built by people long since dead whose objectives aren’t quite clear. It’s not a light read or a happy one but it’s very interesting and gripping.

Sunday is a character you can relate to in a situation that’s very hard to imagine. Her sympathies towards the AI Chimp and her understanding that he is just doing what he is programmed to do is refreshing. The other characters, Chimp included are well-rounded and interesting, with enough mystique about them to make you distrust them.

Although I enjoy reading sci-fi I did feel like some of the terminology and technical parts of the book did go over my head a bit at times. Upon reading other reviews I realise now that this is loosely part of a series. Although I did enjoy it as a standalone piece I did feel that some parts were not particularly well explained and there were some hints to the wider story world that weren’t elaborated upon – if anything it has made me want to read the others in the series now! I also felt the ending was probably the weakest part of the book but that might make more sense if it’s part of a series.

Overall The Freeze Frame Revolution is a must-read for sci-fi lovers; it’s short and sharp and will stay with you long after you’ve put it down. Thank you to NetGalley and Tachyon Publications for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Sunday is an evolutionary specialist on a ship that travels through the galaxies at relativistic speeds, planting wormhole gates so that humanity—or its successors—can have access to FTL travel. Most of her time is spent in stasis, so 60 million years or so have gone by and the things that come out of the gates, when they do come out, don’t seem to have much in common with humans, but the mission continues regardless. Which is why some of the other humans decide to revolt. Sunday is closer with the ship’s AI than others, but she also has reservations of her own. There’s a lot of otherness in the book, from the AI to the post-human/galactic landscapes to the “humans” whose lives are lived in tiny chunks across millions of years, after they were programmed for the mission. I found it well-crafted but, as with other works of his, emotionally rather limited.

Oh woooooow, that’s some heavy sci-fi. Calling all science nerds this is the book for you. Think the Martian but without a pause to explain for all the dummies in the room. Watts hits hard and doesn’t stop with the space travel and science world building.

Sunday is just one of 30,000 people aboard a spaceship cruising through space and time. As they progress they’re planting wormholes to planet Earth. They were groomed for the mission since they were young. Earth is a bit of a dump so the chance to get off the planet is a welcome barter. If Earth gets better, they’ll get to loop back. If not, then they’re better off on the ship. And they’ll get to wait a long time to see if Earth is rehabilitated — they’re stored in between shifts on deck in tubes that keep them frozen until the ship needs them next. This is all decided by the on-board AI. But what if after so many years something isn’t quite right. How do you take back control from an all seeing and hearing computer system? Can you?

While this is just a novella (but as I understand is a part of a larger series of short stories), the plot flies by leaving you wondering whats going to happen next as thousands of years pass by in our story.

A super interesting concept, I think fans of sci-fi and especially time travel stories will enjoy this quick read.

A review in spanish:
https://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-freeze-frame-revolution-peter-watts.html

I wanted to like this novella a lot more than I actually did.

Years ago when I first discovered Starfish, Watts’ writing felt like a revelation: Here was someone who could do hard science fiction right, who had done some hard digging into the scientific literature, thought a while, and come up with a well-reasoned “what if” near-future scenario. A tremendously bleak future, yes, but full of detail: it was never hard to imagine how that world arose from our present, what it would look like, what technology we would have and why it evolved that way.

With The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Watts has also clearly put in his research time, but it all feels too abstract to be truly compelling. There are a lot of ideas here, but I spent most of my time feeling very lost, not knowing why things were happening, or else unable to picture even the most basic details of the setting.


What is Chimp? An AI, yes, but then what’s with the mention of multiple reincarnations? It seems to be organic one moment, then digital the next.
How does the ship fly? Apparently by generating black holes, but I don’t understand any part of that.
Why are they building all these gates in the first place? All I got was that humanity was in some kind of trouble, but why would the gates fix it?
My biggest question: Why is nobody concerned about the GIANT SPACE MONSTERS coming out of the gates?! If your whole plan was to build these gates to help humanity travel, shouldn’t you... maybe do something about that?


Unfortunately the end impression for me was not great: too many confusing details, too little explanation for anything, flat characters... and all throughout a smug “look how clever I am!” tone that I didn’t much care for. I’m not sure now if Starfish was just a momentary bit of brilliance or if Revolution just happened to miss that mark, but either way, I think it may be a while before I return to this author.

Short, but great. I have been thinking about the story a lot. Great for hard sci-fi fans who are looking for a shorter experience. Upon finishing, I wanted more, and was pleasantly surprised to find a number of Peter Watts' short stories that fleshed out the background for this novella.
''

Sunday Ahzmundin is one of 30,000 people aboard the Eriophora, a spaceship that traverses the galaxy building wormhole gates, which it has doing for over 60 million years. The ship's AI, called the Chimp, keeps everyone in stasis most of the time. Sunday wakes up in a group with 5 or 6 other people every thousand years, but she's only awake a few days each time so she's only aged about 20 years.

Sunday used to believe in the mission for which she was bred. She used to like spending time with the Chimp, reading some range of emotional intelligence into its behavior. She even saw it dance once. But when she finds that some lives are considered expendable, everything changes. How do you conspire against an AI when the ship can see and hear through your neural implants, only wakes you when it wants, and controls who is woken with you?

The premise of the story is fantastic. After a semi-technical introduction about punching black holes through space, Sunday brings you up to speed on her situation, including how often she's been awake over the past 60 million years and that she's often referred to as the ships' "pet". I'm a big fan of scifi about AI, and I fully expected Chimp to follow in the footsteps of HAL 9000, but he is his own computer. The plot heats up slowly as Sunday joins the resistance to overthrow Chimp and end the mission. The revolution sends secret coded messages through D&D manuals and musical compositions.

I'm surprised how well paced the story manages to be when all the humans have to go back to sleep for thousands of years every couple of chapters. However, the book misses out on what should be some good emotional reactions to fellow shipmates, Chimp, and the events that follow from the protagonist. Recommended as a short hard scifi that's big on both time and spatial scope!

This is the third of Watt's books that I've read, the first two being the Firefall duology. I was amazed then at the depth and creativity that Watt's had into his books, and utterly unnerved at the pure alienness of them. This book is nearly completely different. For one, it's much more accessible; both the language and the science behind the technology are much softer than his previous novels. I won't say it's completely handwavey, but it is a hell of a lot closer than Echopraxia. I think.

Anywho, to the book. The story tells of Sunday, one of the crew of a giant asteroid flying through space creating gateways for humanity to follow. The premise being that earth has become uninhabitable or somesuch, and need to now populate the galaxy. The crew of 30,000 get taken out of cryo every hundred or thousand years to help supervise the building of the gates, and then get put back to sleep until next time. In such a manner, the ship continues on for millions of years.

This is were the plot got interesting (and, at the start, a bit confusing). Only half a dozen to a dozen of the crew are awake at a time, so they only ever get to know a few others, even though this journey spans millions of years. Why is the system set up like this? We find out later, but for the first bit it's this intriguing plot point dragging you in.

Pacing wise, it's hard to really comment. The main character, Sunday, is woken and put to sleep in large sections of time, and simply recounts the events quite quickly. That said, I think it worked really well. None of the events are ever so special that you wise you'd read more about them, and the pace keeps a quick pace towards the second half, so you're always looking forward instead of back.

Overall, this was a great read, and I really wish it had gone on for longer and explored more aspects, but as it was it was such an enjoyable read and some mystery is nice to have now and again.