Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

A detective on a generation starship is an interesting premise. Olivia Waite has taken the venerable concept of a slower-than-light spaceship, the Fairweather, taking humans to another star system and given it several new aspects. She has moved the launch date into a medium-distant future. The people on the ship are not desperate refugees fleeing any catastrophe recognizable to contemporary readers, nor are they intrepid explorers of the unknown. Humans of this future have mastered closed-circle ecology to the extent that they were capable of building a vessel designed for a voyage lasting more than a thousand years; indeed, as Murder by Memory they have been underway for more than 300 years. Biological sciences have advanced far enough that recording all of a person’s memories is a routine procedure. New human bodies can be produced in two days, rather than the customary nine months, and in this future it is done without requiring another human to do the producing. The ship’s computer is a genuine AI, though content to just run the ship and in fairness to Waite, she shows the computer mostly in the unusual circumstances produced by an interstellar magnetic storm. I think the story also implies that humans have mastered gravity sufficiently to generate it on the ship without a need for rotation or similar techniques.

Waite is not interested in the workings of a generation ship generally, or even in the specifics that she has set up; she is interested in arranging them so that she can tell the story of a detective clearing up a mystery. The ship has no police as such. As Waite describes the background, “From launch, the Fairweather’s Community Charter had been very clear that police were considered largely unnecessary. We had a small security force Ferry could deploy as needed—glorified bouncers, really—and a wealth of social workers in various fields; these two groups managed most everyday crises that arose.” (p. 19) So the society that built the Fairweather has not only solved gravity, it has apparently solved all of the human problems that give rise to sudden violence or to slower forms of cruelty. That’s not entirely accurate; Waite gestures toward the situations that call for the presence of ship’s detectives. “For more complex situations—your elaborate hoaxes, your sudden deaths, your inexplicable accidents and incidents in which witness statements vastly differed—there were the ship’s detectives. We had no power to arrest or enforce: our duty was strictly to sort out the truth from the lies and report them to the Crime Committee, which would arrange for any necessary punishments or reparations.” (p. 19) The very list implies a society bereft of abusers, sadists and assholes.

Waite has imposed other constraints on life aboard the Fairweather, the most important of which is that there are only about 10,000 people on board. Sure, that is a lot of people to put on a spaceship for a thousand years or more. On the other hand, it’s terribly small for a complete society. That’s fewer people than, say, Decatur County, Tennessee, the ninth-least-populous county of that state’s 95 counties. The ship seems to provide everyone’s material needs in something like fully automated luxury space communism, although Waite has set up another unusual constraint: the ship’s replicators — known as retromats — can only make what people can recall. If you are ordering trousers and forget about buttons or pockets, then good luck keeping them closed or carrying things in them. Waite writes that “most people could make fabrics easily, and more than a few passengers on the Fairweather made extra money by creating and selling patterns to turn those fabrics into garments.” (pp. 21–22)

Two more oddities of this very small society. First, everyone is immortal, practically speaking. The ship can reconstitute bodies from scratch, and technologies allow passengers to record their complete mental state, including memories, and upload the recording to a library that the ship holds. The same ten thousand people can expect to spend centuries together, recycling body after body. The novella’s first-person narrator, Dorothy Gentleman, speaks of having grown old several times, with her body eventually degrading in ways that became recognizable and familiar with repetition. I don’t see why that would happen. People often say that growing old sucks, but it beats the alternative; on board the Fairweather there would seem to be a very different alternative available. Waite doesn’t show any exceptionally strong taboos against checking out of a body when it starts to get clunky and checking into a new one of the desired age a couple of days later. I guess people just accept growing old and feeble, even when it’s not necessary?

Second, and probably relatedly, there don’t seem to be any children on the Fairweather. The word “children” does not appear in the novella at all, and “child” only appears twice, once in reference to distant memories of Earth and once in a simile. One of the most basic aspects of human life — having and raising children — appears to have disappeared completely on this ship, and nobody remarks on it at all. The Fairweather is a generation ship with but one generation sailing on century after century. This is a deeply weird society, and Waite portrays it as unremarkable. That made Murder by Memory a very peculiar book for me. The setup is at variance with human history along several axes, and this is not really developed but simply serves as the backdrop for a minor mystery. Dorothy was on the right track when she observes that “Money was still the root of many crimes, even on a ship where everyone’s needs were seen to” (p. 59) but when she eventually unraveled the crime, it looked to me like the kind of thing that basic banking controls would have picked up long ago, especially with the ship’s computer managing the macroeconomy, and that a close-knit society, as one the size of Fairweather must be, would also have picked up on long ago. Waite’s characters behave like sophisticated, educated inhabitants of a large and often anonymous city; they do not act like people who have been living together in a small town, let alone doing that for three centuries.

Murder by Memory was also very obviously a set-up for a longer series of stories. Some characters are introduced but don’t do very much; Dorothy’s nephew’s new partner stood out to me. He appears a few times, and Dorothy even relates “that would be the first and last time I would underestimate [him]” (p. 36) but he doesn’t do anything else in the novella to show why he shouldn’t be underestimated. I thought that the strangeness of the setting could benefit from a longer story to make it fit together better, but I suspect that Waite just wants to tell episodic tales of cases that Dorothy solves, I don’t think that the oddness interests her at all. The second Dorothy Gentleman novella, Nobody’s Baby was recently published, and the third, Double Dorothy is scheduled for 2027; the continuation and the Hugo nomination show that there is an audience for these tales. I’m just not really part of it.

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Murder by Memory was the fifth of this year’s finalists for Best Novella that I have read, and the third I have written about. The other two are Cinder House and What Stalks the Deep.