The Freeze-Frame Revolution, by Peter Watts
Synopsis: A group of engineers living in a total-surveillance spaceship decide they must overthrow its near-omniscient sovereign AI, and have to figure out how to do so while also only being awake a few days every several thousand years.
Book Review: I continue to love everything Peter Watts writes. He is a super-stimulus to my taste in fiction.
The premise of the book is already interesting. A covert revolution with ridiculous constraints on action, against a tyrant that can decide to never wake you up every time you go to sleep if he finds out what you’re planning. Watts then rockets us directly into Kafka territory, as the crew almost immediately loses all contact with the rest of humanity due to sleeping away eons between their shifts to create wormhole gates. Why do they continue to make gates for a humanity that may not exist anymore? Why are eldritch monstrosities erupting from these gates and trying to destroy their ship? Why does anything matter? It doesn’t, just keep making gates, that’s your sole purpose, so latch onto it.
After reading a number of works by an author, you come to see common themes between them. Watts’s books are always incredibly lonely. The characters within them are singular and alone. The rest of humanity either doesn’t exist, or may as well not exist anymore. Their peers are all distant, strange creatures, whom one can’t form bonds with. Everything is cold, and quiet, and isolation is all-pervasive. (yes, I love this)
Also, Watts loves non-sapient intelligences. Things that behave as if conscious, but which are not. They are generally incredibly creepy. One of the major themes in Freeze-Frame is the protagonist slowly coming to accept that the AI she speaks with isn’t a person. It’s a series of flow-charts and equations meant to mimic human interaction. And this hurts, because due to the previously-discussed isolation, the AI was the only friend she had. Not only is she losing her friend, she’s realizing she never had one to begin with.
Probably.
The mark of a good book is, of course, the drawing together of mood and theme into a compelling plot that moves the reader through the story, and Freeze-Frame has that too. The changes that occur over deep time, and the insane level of engineering that was bent to the task of making a thing that would remain stable over so long (and the interesting ways it fails) tie into the covert revolution plot as well. There’s just so much to love here for fans of dark SF.
The two main complaints I have is that the protagonist is the only developed character, everyone else is a bit one-dimensional. I’m not sure that’s a valid complaint though, because the fact that no one else feels fully real is to be expected when you are so isolated and have no connections to anyone. The other complaint is that this is too short. Not just in a “Hey, I want more!” way (although there’s that too!), but in a “This is basically a novella being sold as a novel,” way. It only barely squeaks into the lower bound of a novel in length. However this does force Watts to keep his prose tight, there aren’t nearly as many ponderous descriptions of objects and actions, and much more getting-to-the-point, which I appreciated. And to be honest, if it was a novella it wouldn’t have been read by our book club, since we only do novels.
Regardless, definitely Recommended!
Book Club Review: A good book for book clubs as well. The fact that it is so short meant no one had trouble finishing it, and we had very high attendance. Not everyone is the Watts fanboy that I am, but most everyone found it interesting. There were quite a few things to talk about, and a bit of speculation about the nature of the reveal near the novel’s end. For that matter, there was speculation about what happened to humanity, and how realistic certain aspects of the story were/weren’t. This is a dense book, and like all of Watts’s books, it expects a lot from the reader. There’ll be just as much discussion about this as there are in most books triple its length. Recommended.
2 Responses to “SF/F Review – The Freeze-Frame Revolution”
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I had actually considered this for my book group for a while, but I was hesitant as Echopraxia didn’t go over all that well. But this has convinced me to give it a try.
Just curious, have you read any of Watt’s other stories set in this universe?
I really liked this book as well. I read it right as it came out. I suppose I don’t have a lot to add today, other than to say I’m glad you enjoyed it too.