Six Wakes takes a fascinating premise and utterly blows it. Six people awaken on a starship. They're clones of the recently murdered crew, who are floating messily in various places around the ship. An unknown saboteur has also disabled the gravity spin, shipboard AI, and wiped the past 25 years. The last that anyone remembers, they were all getting aboard for their tour, before the long duration colonization mission with a cargo of cyrogenic sleepers.

But there's a twist. Each of the six members of the crew is a criminal. And their crimes relate to the development of the Codicils on Human Cloning back on Earth. Making people is easy, and making people better is also easy, with genetic code and mind maps helpfully annotated in a Visual Studio Code style interface. Except that it is also incredibly illegal. A ban on human hacking, along with prohibitions on multiplicity and clones having children, define the use of clones on Earth.

It's an interesting premise, let down by floppiness in execution. The background of cloning and clone crimes which is ostensibly supposed to drive the narrative feels more like theatrical set dressing than a scifi premise. Sleaving in Altered Carbon is handled with infinite more interest.

Worse, a mystery depends on hidden knowledge and a good use of point of view, which is not the case here. A third person PoV drifts from character to character without much distinction between who the camera is on, or past and present. The criminal pasts of the crew is known to each individual, while the reader is left in the dark. What could have been an interesting game of trust and shifting alliances as the crew seeks to uncover the initial sabotage and mass murder is instead a clumsy whodunnit.

I'd like to be more generous, but honestly, the book was poisoned for me from line 1, which was a dedication to Connie Willis, my absolute least favorite author. Lafferty is a better writer than Willis, but still hits many of the same dull beats.