Subscribe Now!
Rollback is on the final ballot for best novel in the Hugo awards this year, and it’s going against John Scalzi’s The Last Colony (the end of the Old Man’s War ‘trilogy’). If I had to pick between the two, even though I love Scalzi’s work and the OMW series, Rollback would win, but it’s a very close call.
Maybe I’m being patriotic in picking the Canadian author over the American, but I’d prefer to think that it’s more about the stories themselves. Rollback is really two stories in one, and two really GOOD stories at that.
Summary: An excellent Hugo nomination, and a very good read. Awesome character development, and some recycled ideas made fresh and interesting. Not quite a must read, but worthy of your time and money any day.
39 years before this novel is set, humanity received it’s first SETI message, translated it, and sent a response (39 year round trip). When the next communication is received — and cannot be interpreted — the original researcher, now an 87 year old woman, is offered a free “Rollback”. A multi-billion dollar procedure that restores the body back to any previous stage in it’s life. She refuses, unless her husband can have one too. Reluctantly the benefactor agrees, but in an early twist (page 30 or so) the rollback fails for her and works for him.
What follows is an interesting exploration of the relationships of “old married people” set against the backdrop of SETI much like Carl Sagan’s novel Contact.
1 response so far ↓
1 Cam // Jun 2, 2008 at 11:22 am
Well my wife and two friends have finished reading this now, so there has been some more discussion. However, since it was all off-line I’ll share the results here:
1. We all agree — after some discussion — that the ending is weak. None of us is quite sure why, but we all seem to feel it’s “too long”. As in it would have been better to just end than tidy up every single loose end.
SPOILER — STOP READING THIS COMMENT (and maybe the responses to it) NOW IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK YET.
2. Major Flaw: The aliens had no way of knowing that Sarah changed her answers at the last moment before sending the first response message 38 years earlier.
Therefore, they should have assumed at every human would have been able to decrypt their message. While it would have been obvious WHO they had chosen to raise their offspring, the fact that the 1000 response answers were randomized from the whole population of the Earth implies that they should have known some humans are at least immoral — if not pure evil.
Thus, the whole “This message was meant for Sarah” idea gets blown out of the water. All the aliens could really have hoped for was that every human on the planet would honor their choice as parent.
I think Sawyer is assuming that 99.9% of his readers aren’t familiar with Applied Cryptography and therefore wouldn’t find this flaw. I however specialized in Applied Crypto at school :)
Leave a Comment