The Freeze-Frame Revolution

What if you were put on a massive space ship with the sole purpose to create wormholes for transport for anyone to use in the future. But here's the catch: since you can't use wormholes that don't exist yet, you are put into stasis for hundreds of thousands of years at a time, only coming out for a few days to complete menial tasks for an AI that was designed to be dumb enough to rely on human help, then going back under. You have been alive for millions of years, far outlasting the death of your own home planet, and even your own home solar system. You watch stars come into existence and die in the span of a short rest.

Would you get bored?
Would you get angry?
Would you start a revolution?
Can you promise that none of the other 30,000 people on board won't?

This is another example of what Peter Watts does best: hard, compelling sci-fi. While not quite as inaccessible as Blindsight or Echopraxia, the prose is still quite technical, laden with loosely accurate scientific theory. But it is just comprehensible enough to be compelling, making for a really great story. The short, contained story also helped in keeping me interested throughout. While the plot is great, the character work is really the unsung hero of any of Watts' works. There are quite a few "filler" characters here, but of the characters we get to know, there's a lot to appreciate in how they're developed.

Watts is hard to recommend because, unless you like a very specific kind of sci-fi, you'll likely walk away from his works frustrated and confused as to why the plot is hidden behind such unnecessary scientific detail. It took me a whole year of reflection to come to appreciate Blindsight, and it still sits with me as one of my favorite science fiction books of the past few years. If you're curious at all, I think Freeze Frame Revolution is a great starting point given its slightly more accessible prose and short length.

Peter Watts has written some pretty interesting tales, and this one has the hallmarks of something amazing, and by the looks of it, it's the start.

Let's rewind. We have a working kind of generation ship that's goal is to leave Earth and set up an interstellar highway. The crew, engineered since birth for the job, wakes up, sets up a new overpass, then goes back to sleep, for eons. Over and over and over. It's a wild idea overall.

A pretty omniscient computer runs the ship, CHIMP that wakes up different groups at different times, manages the ship while everyone snores on. Easy! Right? Hah!

The problem, there is no end. When do they stop, how do they know? This bothered me; it also bothered the crew. Programmatically I'm really surprised at the frame that has to be built here. The winning scenario is that the many years removed Earth civilization will travel up to them through one of their gates and say, "Hi there! All done!"

That seems rife with problems. As my grandfather said, "Feces happens."

The book is built upon this idea of waking, working, sleeping, rinse repeat and figuring out a way to hide a mutiny within the pages, between the lines, so a sophisticated AI doesn't know about it.

I enjoyed the book for the idea set forth. What I didn't like was the trope activated. You have a one method win solution for the computer and crew to end on. That seems horrible from any point of view. Why didn't the Earthers setup up an iterative check-in, roll back concept after X (X=100) gates, or time-oriented? This binary situation creates everything of this mess and it's hard for the technologist in me to grapple with that one fulcrum. The people who made the project, the AI, the amazing things to be described within are all hinging on a one win scenario? Nah, that's inconceivable.

I liked the idea, characters, technology, strange concepts, shadows in the dark, and unknown things to come--I just really had a tough time accepting the premise. Get by that, and you'll be good.