James Nicoll Reviews

2025’s Murder by Memory is the first of Olivia Waite’s Dorothy Gentleman science fiction mysteries.

Ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman wakes. This is a surprise as she intended to remain as stored memory for the time being. This is simply the first of a series of surprises, the next one being that she is in the wrong body.

But first! Background exposition!

The Fairweather is 307 years into a thousand-year journey from Earth¹ to a new world. In a sense, the Fairweather is a generation ship, since it will take generations to reach its destination. In another sense, it is not, as the passengers are immortals occupying series of bodies, their memories carefully stored and updated in their own personal book. Everyone who boarded the Fairweather in the year zero will live to disembark.

Everyone except for one unlucky passenger.

The events leading to Dorothy’s resurrection are as follows: Dorothy’s book was destroyed, along with the books adjacent to it. While this would be an inconvenience for anyone currently inhabiting a body, as they could create a new book, the event should have expunged Dorothy, as her only copy was in her book.

Except it wasn’t. Thanks to Dorothy’s brilliant nephew Rutherford Talmadge IV AKA Ruthie, there was a backup so secret Dorothy had no idea it existed. As soon as Dorothy’s primary book was erased, the ship’s mind, Ferry, decanted the memories in the backup book into the first available body, that of Gloria Vowell. To make room for Dorothy, Gloria was erased.

Coincident with the above, one Janet Dodds died. Cause of death is drowning in a tub full of memory-inducing liquid. This could have been an accident, but the scene is so artful as to have been staged. Which it was.

Good news for Janet! There’s nothing wrong with her book, so her death, natural or orchestrated, is an inconvenience rather than a tragedy. Nevertheless, Dorothy is determined to arrive at explanations for Janet’s death and the destruction of the shelf of books — or an explanation, if the two events are connected.

As in fact they are.

There’s a straightforward explanation for the books’ destruction. Gloria’s body has in its pockets the tools needed. Why did Gloria destroy the books? What, if anything, did she have to do with Janet’s death? And why would Gloria target for destruction a shelf of books that contained her own memories but not Janet’s?

All questions Gloria could answer, if only she had not erased her own book immediately before Ferry commandeered her body for Dorothy’s use, permanently erasing Gloria’s only instance. As it is, Dorothy will have to investigate for herself.

~oOo~

The ad copy calls the ship HMS Fairweather, but the sequence HMS and the word ​“majesty” do not appear in the text. Waite is an established, successful author of nonfantastic queer romances, many of which appear to be set in the British monarchy. Perhaps the blurb writer assumed there’d be a monarchal connection?

[People who don’t care about worldbuilding may want to skip this section and scroll down to the square bracket marked HERE.]

As my readers might expect, I will first discuss worldbuilding. This book is just one of the many books I’ve read recently, often from one particular publisher, that feature obtrusive, silly worldbuilding choices, from flying moosen to curiously low-gravity Jupiters.

Case in point: Fairweather is subject to periodic magnetic storms. Why?

The science people say they’re [the storms are]… something. About this corner of space. The quasars? So there may be many more of them. 

Quasi-stellar objects, super luminous galactic cores, are rare in the current era. The nearest one is 600 million light-years away. Certain locations have richer populations of quasars… far away and thanks to the speed of light, in the distant past. The comment about quasars raises a lot of questions that could by easily avoided by omitting the word ​“quasar.”

Of much greater relevance to the plot, the question of backups, or more exactly, why is it that only Dorothy has a backup book²? It’s a plot point that books have been accidentally damaged in the past, with tragic results. Obviously, there is a limit to how off-site an off-site backup can get on a generation ship, but why not have several libraries in different locations around Fairweather? Books do not appear to be so resource intensive that backups would be impractical.

The Watsonian answer may be that Fairweather was built and crewed by bright idiots, people whose genius is matched by their astonishing blind spots. We’ve all used devices designed by those people³. The Doylist answer is Waite can’t tell the story she wants to tell if everyone has secure backups⁴.

[HERE]

Points to the author for coming up with a novel crime dependent on the particular assortment of regulations and technology available to the characters. Gloria has a very unpleasant little scheme going and there’s a reason why she felt the need to risk such an attention-getting crime as erasing books.

A reader who isn’t obsessed with the worldbuilding will likely enjoy this more than I did. Despite the dire nature of Gloria’s key insight, the tone is surprisingly light, the plot moves along nicely and — that one murderous sociopath aside — the characters are enjoyable.

Murder by Memory is available here (Tordotcom). here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Generally speaking, at least in modern generation ship stories, such ships are a desperate bid to escape doomed Earth, thus taking care of the obligatory USA delenda. In this case, while the intent is to preserve a future for humanity, Earth appears to be perfectly fine… or it was 307 years ago.

2: To be fair, it would not be surprising to discover that Ruthie has backups for everyone he cares about and sod the rest.

3: Sometimes the problem is not so much design as technical writing. The first debit machine I had in my store had a very thick user’s manual, which detailed all sorts of arcane aspects of the device… but not how to replace the receipt roll, which was surprisingly tricky.

4: Something I expect will feature more prominently in future volumes in this projected series: the ten thousand people on Fairweather are stuck with each other for a thousand years. What is to be done with habitual criminals? Stick them in storage for the rest of the journey?