Olivia Waite’s Murder by Memory arrives at a peak time for SFF murder mystery, and even more particularly for space murder mystery. If you love this genre as I do, you know that we’ve been blessed with a proliferation of fantastic books along these lines: Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes, Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven, Victor Manibo’s Escape Velocity, and S.A. Barnes’s Dead Silence, to name just a few. Murder by Memory enters a thriving field with confidence and aplomb.
Our detective, Dorothy Gentleman, is accustomed to waking up in a fresh body. As a traveler aboard the generation ship Fairweather, she shares certain privileges with the other passengers. Their memories and consciousness will be regularly backed up into memory books, stored in the ship’s library. When they inevitably succumb to old age (or die in some other way), their consciousness will be downloaded into a freshly produced copy of their original body, and they can proceed with another iteration of their life. If they prefer to take a break from living—as who wouldn’t, now and then?—they can elect to keep their consciousness stashed away in the memory book for a few years. After a painful loss, that’s exactly what Dorothy has done. So it’s a bit of a shock to find that she’s been downloaded into a new body ahead of schedule. Worse, it’s not even her body. Worst of all, the person who had the body before her is probably a murderer.
A woman called Janet—the long-time business partner of the body Dorothy finds herself in—is found dead in the aftermath of a magnetic storm that rattled the ship’s systems. Janet appears to have drowned herself in a bathtub full of memory liquor. But Dorothy doesn’t buy it, and her chief suspect is the person whose body she’s walking around in, a woman named Gloria Vowell who had absolutely no business wandering around the ship in the midst of a magnetic storm.
Olivia Waite made her name in historical romance, and she now comes skipping across genre lines with a clear love and enthusiasm for the spaces she’s now writing in: Our detective recalls Dorothy Sayers by name and Miss Marple by nature (complete with a beloved nephew), and a yarn shop—cozy mysteries’ favorite type of business establishment—features prominently. On the SFF side, our background is a generation ship riddled with the morally gray queer folks of which contemporary SFF is so fond. Too, Waite’s got a wonderful eye for details to make her imagined world feel lived in: Our detective remarks that although no light comes in through the windows of each cabin, all the passengers—refugees from Earth—still tend to put their desks below the window, “as if we were careful to leave space in our lives for the weather we never experienced on board ship.”
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Murder by Memory
Murder by Memory
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Despite its brief length, Murder by Memory feels instantly welcoming, its setting and characters at once familiar and unique. Waite’s fully invested in the speculative elements of her novel. The trope of the generation ship is a longtime favorite of mine, because I love it when the characters are stuck with each other and cannot leave (see also: boarding school). Waite has put a fun spin on it by making all the passengers functionally immortal. Imagine being on a very large road trip that lasts your entire life, and then you die and you can finally get away from all those damn people you’re tired of, and then you wake up alive and do the whole thing all over again. And again. And again. Being honest, I’d probably do a murder, too. My defense at the murder trial would be the same defense I use for everything: I am an introvert and a Taurus. No jury on earth would convict.
The biggest clue that Waite is coming from the romance genre is how vividly interested she is in her characters’ experience of embodiment. Dorothy Gentleman keeps being brought up short by her discomfiture at finding herself in a body other than her own. “Imagine going to the washroom to be sick and having someone else’s sick come out,” she thinks, upon first awaking. “I came very close to making this more than a metaphor.” Later, when she realizes that someone has properly, actually, forever died, their memory book wiped from existence along with their working consciousness, she has an acutely physical reaction to the idea. “My stomach—[her host body’s] stomach, oh god—lurched. I had one very bad moment when it felt like my body and my mind were fighting to tear apart from each other.”
On the more pleasant side, if you are into mind-altering experiences (I am not), is the alcohol of choice on board Fairweather, a thing called memory liquor. It was invented as a way to retain specific memories and experiences, even small ones, that might be lost or degraded over the years of travel. “Memories of Earth, the kind we couldn’t make on board the Fairweather, sorted by type and distilled into distinct colors and flavors. You could mix them like any cocktail.” When mixed well, memory liquor creates a distinct somatic experience, more vivid than the kind of memory that takes place purely in the mind. “This,” Dorothy thinks after drinking a cocktail made by a particularly skilled mixologist, “felt like the kind of memory the body carried. ”
Murder by Memory is quite a linear mystery, without much in the way of red herrings or side quests. Dorothy follows clues as they arise and unravels the mystery without too much trouble—though Waite cleverly includes a little spike at the end, to complicate what we thought we knew about some of the characters. But the book leaves alluring hints at what’s to come future installments in the series. We still have plenty to learn about memory liquor, Dorothy’s nephew and his partner, and the yarn shop proprietor—among others—and it’s clear Waite knows more than she’s telling. Wry, strange, and generous, Murder by Memory is a fantastic series opener, with a vivid setting and intriguing characters that leave readers wanting more.
Murder by Memory is available from Tordotcom Publishing.
