I do love weird memory stories, so the title of Olivia Waite’s sci-fi debut caught my eye. But a glance at the blurb and some reviews suggested it might not be my style, so I decided to pass until its Hugo nomination sent it back up my list. After reading Murder by Memory, it’s pretty clear that I’m not in the target audience, but I’ll still do my best to sort out my thoughts and what that ideal audience may be.
Murder by Memory is a generation ship murder mystery with period stylings. The lead is typically an older woman who serves as a detective on the ship. She’d been dead two years before the events of the novella, but an emergency prompts the ship’s AI to summon her stored consciousness into a new body. And lo and behold, there’s a murder case to solve.
Murder by Memory is very much in the cozy mystery subgenre, and I’d argue it leans quite a bit more on the cozy than on the mystery. To be sure, there is a mystery to solve, but it’s not the sort of book that lays out a host of potential suspects and various clues pointing toward and against them—at barely 20,000 words, it’s simply not long enough to do the job while still delivering the desired atmosphere. Instead, the lead interviews a few relevant figures and slowly gains information until she reaches the point where she can parse out exactly what happened and why. As a mystery, it’s not particularly inspiring, with motivational details that sometimes feel a touch Byzantine and a handful of secondary characters with a tendency to blur together.
The stylings, on the other hand? Well, as I mentioned at the outset, they don’t necessarily grab me, but I can see the vision. The elderly detective with a British accent and penchant for knitting clearly means to stir up a certain sort of feeling—with the marketing name-checking Miss Marple and the author mentioning P.G. Wodehouse as an inspiration—and is generally successful. Despite a futuristic and queer-normative environment, the setting and characterization both evoke the sort of early 20th century period vibes that lead the reader to expect a comfort read where everything will work out in the end.
And for readers looking for a low-stress way to spend an hour or two—perhaps with a blanket or a cup of tea—Murder by Memory serves the purpose perfectly well. At no point did I find the reading especially difficult, nor did it stir up feelings of anger or anxiety. The cozy detective story isn’t my personal favorite way to pass the time, and I’m not convinced the mystery itself holds up especially well, but it’s undoubtedly an easy read.
Under different circumstances, I could’ve easily seen myself tagging this as a three-star comfort read for someone who isn’t me and moving on, but its status as a Hugo finalist means that I spent a day reflecting further in discussion with one of my online book clubs. And Murder by Memory isn’t the sort of book that benefits from extra scrutiny. That’s not especially surprising, as it seems designed to evoke a feeling more than it is to hold together as a plausible depiction of the future, but there are so many bits of worldbuilding that become more and more irksome the more they’re put under the microscope.
Wiping away debt between physical death and resurrection certainly stands out as a way to guard against the long-term hoarding of wealth, but it also creates perverse incentives in a financial system that’s more important to the plot than it probably has the right to be. Resurrection into the same old bodies with the same old aches and pains—with the notable exception of gender reassignment—makes the story queer-affirming while allowing the lead to convincingly act like an older woman, but it becomes harder and harder to swallow the more one thinks on the physical ailments that are not being addressed. And the minor aside about how the functionally immortal passengers will return to mortality at planetfall introduces a host of questions about how this society agreed to such a structure. And some of the decisions by the ship’s AI, which I’ll only allude to so as to avoid spoilers, feel like they ought to rock society at its foundations, whereas in reality they’re barely noticed.
The assumption that nearly every character has lived multiple natural lives also makes little sense in light of the actual characterization. Apart from the lead acting older, everyone else behaves as if they are their apparent age. The lead’s nephew and his partner act like young men, for all that they’ve theoretically lived hundreds of years. The memory-of-past lives conceit again plays very little non-aesthetic role. Instead, every piece of the story is meant to evoke a particular sort of reading experience, whether or not it makes sense in the book’s actual setting.
On the whole, Murder by Memory is a pleasant read that largely succeeds in evoking a particular feeling, but the mystery itself is uninspiring, the characterization is sketchy, and the worldbuilding falls apart under an ounce of scrutiny. That’s a profile which has its fans, so I’m not surprised to see others enjoying this one, but “best of the year” hype admittedly has me puzzled.
Recommended if you like: pleasant-but-shallow tales in queernorm settings.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Older Protagonist, and it’s also a Book Club selection and a Murder Mystery.
Overall rating: 10 of Tar Vol’s 20. Two stars on Goodreads.