So, I’ll start out by saying that this story has a really unique and fascinating premise. Sunday Ahzmundin is part of a crew of 30,000 people that are flying through the galaxy on their spaceship, the Eriophora. I’m not sure I 100% understood the technology that is involved, but from what I do think I understand a bit, it uses a singularity drive (so, a black hole), and they continuously make ‘gates’ with it, which I believe are used to make wormholes that they travel through.

That’s not really important, in the grand scheme of things, but what is important is that out of these 30,000 people, only about 5 or 6 people, usually the same ‘tribe’, but sometimes mixed up a bit, are awake at a time. Everyone else is… well, pretty much dead. Frozen, or… in stasis… but still, mostly dead. The imagery is there. The place they’re stored are called crypts. The vessels in which they are stored are coffins. They’re only woken up once every few thousand years, and even then, only for a few days at a time.

So, this crew of people have been out in the universe, travelling on their mission… for 60 million years. But for them, maybe… twenty something conscious years have actually passed. Something they remember from a day ago really happened thousands of years ago. The ship’s AI, an entity called The Chimp, talks to them and helps them through their days, wakes them randomly depending on perceived necessary specialties depending on where they are. A lot of people are starting to… not really trust Chimp though… Some people are starting to want more freedoms… And some are noticing that some shady stuff is happening…

And so…. space-mutiny! But… well, I mean how do you coordinate something like that when you and your mutineers are only awake one day of every thousand?

I was absolutely enthralled by this book. As I said, I’m not certain that I ‘got’ all the intricacies of the science/technology and probably theoretical physics that this ship runs on, but I absolutely loved the premise and the adventure that Sunday and her friends had. I really liked Sunday as a character as well. She’s pretty snarky at times, which I always like in a character. Having her story be in first person, seeing things from her point of view, which I could somewhat relate to as a sometimes-snarky gal who swears a lot… well, even when I didn’t always get it, it didn’t matter. I was never bored with it. I never felt like the really sciencey bits (that didn’t always so much go over my head as smacked me in the forehead a bit) really made this hard to understand or boring. I’m not sure if I can put this more eloquently, lol. You don’t have to be a theoretical physicist to enjoy this story. It’s pretty hard sci-fi which I’m not always a fan of, but I hoped since I liked Blindsight that I’d like this one, and it turns out that I liked this one a lot!

It’s also pretty short. Maybe not quite a novella (or maybe just a very long novella), but not as long as I was expecting it to be. Just long enough! I finished it in a couple of hours.

Thanks to the author as well as Tachyon Publications via NetGalley for the review copy. :)

I've been a fan of Peter Watts since I read BLINDSIGHT, his 2006 novel that was a finalist for the Hugo award in 2007. I remember not being really sure of what I was reading, but I was convinced that Watts was writing some pretty cool stuff of the type I hadn't much seen before. His material is not for the weak of heart; it's dark, thought provoking, and in general not very optimistic. It's smart, layered, and involved. It's not summertime beach reading.

Watts' latest novella - or novel, if you believe the publisher (according to a footnote in the acknowledgements) - "The Freeze Frame Revolution", fits all those descriptions. It is, apparently, part of a sequence of stories called Sunflowers. One of the stories in the sequence, The Island, won the 2010 Hugo award for Best Novelette. The Island, which I made a point of mentioning in my review of Watts' short story collection Beyond the Rift, follows "The Freeze Frame Revolution" chronologically in the sequence. The other stories are "Hotshot" and "Giants", which I have not read. I don't believe that reading "The Freeze Frame Revolution" without reading the others will detract from the reader's enjoyment of the story, but of course your mileage may vary.

As with "The Island", the story tells the tale of the crew of a star ship that is travelling throughout space to build a network of wormholes that will allow interstellar travel (and thus get around the problem of the limitation imposed by the speed of light). It actually didn't occur to me until I was reading "The Freeze Frame Revolution" that those wormhole networks really had to be built by someone; they can't just mystically appear, although most novels don't spend much time, if any, talking about how the networks came to be. There are several thousand crew members, and every few thousand years the ship's AI, CHIMP, wakes up a subset of them to help build the next gate in the network. In general, CHIMP doesn't really need the human crew in most cases, but just in case something goes wrong some humans are awakened - to keep an eye on things. These crew members are only awake for a few days at a time, then go back to into hibernation.

And thus, we see the scale of the story and the challenge presented to the crew. The mission is lasting millions (if not billions) of years; after all, the ship, the Eriophora - an apt name given its function - does not have the benefit of the very wormhole gate network they are building. The mission planners are certainly no longer around, so the crew questions whether the mission is even useful any more. Has humanity developed some advanced technology that supersedes the need for the wormhole gate network?

And how do you make friends, how do you communicate with the people you do meet? CHIMP determines who is awake at any given time. While the crew is divided into groups such that group members work together, not all members of the group are awakened at the same time, and sometimes people outside the group are awakened to give the work teams a mix, a different perspective How do you communicate across the millennia, especially if you're trying to organize a group with common interests? And how do you something in secret right under the nose of an AI that can monitor your every move, an AI that has control over everything on the ship, including who lives and dies?

While the basis to the story is the building of the wormhole gate network, this is really a story about humanity trying to perform a mission they're not sure has meaning any longer. It's dark, and it's not pleasant - but it's vintage Peter Watts. It's an engaging piece of fiction that will have you wondering about the makers of the next wormhole gate network you read about in someone else's story - and whether they ever finished the project, and if they did, what happened after that. It's science fiction on a grand scale, covering countless millennia and light-years. It's a story that doesn't leave the reader comfortable, and it's terrific. But if you wanted comfortable, you wouldn't be reading anything by Peter Watts.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is some classy hard-hard SF. :) Black hole/worm hole drive using new and real theories? Hell yeah.

But beyond that, I love the whole idea of short periods of wakefulness during a single trip that takes 65 million years.

Add a rebellion against IBM... I mean HAL... I mean CHIMP, without expecting anything to go quite the way that 2001 went, or even remotely like it, and we've got a really fascinating story.

Watts knows how to build really fascinating locations and situations... maybe better than almost any other writer. He never rests on a single awesome idea but adds to it and introduces even more interesting wrinkles such as watching an AI dance, or truly alien intelligences, or maybe just freaking out because the rest of humanity must necessarily be dead during the scope of your mission.

But add a complicated revolution among sleepers using old D&D manuals? Adding jarring notes during a musical composition?

Oh yeah, the devil is in the details. :)

I'm enjoying this novel(la according to the author) through Netgalley as an ARC, but this wonderful reviewer here: Claudia's Review has pointed out that this is not a standalone story. She's even provided a link to the author's website for the other stories (free to download) as well as the suggested reading order. Thank you!

I might be reading out of order, but I don't mind it all that much. Watts is a thinking man's hard-SF writer. I expect to be at least a little challenged and delighted. As anyone who has read Blindsight knows. :)

First of all, this novella is not meant to be read on its own. Could be regarded as a standalone, but you’ll feel like something is missing. And that’s because it’s part of a series of stories, entitled the Sunflower cycle, which includes three more short ones (so far).*

Publication order is: The Island (2009) - Winner of Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2010 -, Hotshot (2014), Giants (2014) and The Freeze-Frame Revolution (June 2018).

Now, after reading all, my advice is they are to be read in this order: Hotshot, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, The Island, Giants. It will not answer all your questions, but it will bring some light into this universe and its perpetual travelers.

Secondly, Peter Watts is not the usual sci-fi writer; he does not construct friendly or appealing worlds, nor does he stage culminating battles. Usual aliens are not part of this work. He weaves his stories around characters in, the least said, out of the ordinary situations.

His stories are not meant to make the reader have an easy time; they are meant to rise questions, ponder things and try to find answers which are not within reach most of the time. Reading all these four stories, you’ll get a better idea about this universe and it will leave wanting more of it. And looks like more will come.

This novella here is no exception. Sunday Ahzmundin was raised specifically for this mission, which is to build a web of wormholes gates throughout space, thus making interstellar travel more accessible. Eriophora (perfect name for what she does) is a gate-building relativistic ship, built inside an asteroid and controlled by an unusual AI, the Chimp.

Not much is happening; it’s the immensity of the scale and the apparent impossibility of the task which our characters are struggling to overcome. How do you plan a mutiny when you are awake just a few days every few thousands of years, at best? And then, there is a big chance when awake not to meet the same people you schemed with.

Therefore, if you like hard sci-fi, a scope as large as the universe, a time scale of billions of years, characters’ psychology and myriad of questions unanswered, you’re in for a treat. I, for one, am looking forward for more stories in this universe.

* all three available on the author’ site: http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

So let's assume there's some way of cheating the restriction that nothing goes faster than light - wormholes, warp gates, hyperspace, call them what you will. But not the sort you carry with you, <i>Star Wars</i>-style - the stargate sort that works a bit like a tunnel network, and needs to be placed out there the slow way by someone who doesn't themselves have the benefit of the cheat they enable. Often, a science fiction setting will say that some long-ago race of forerunners, perhaps vanished, laid out the network ready for our heroes. <i>The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet</i> poked at what it might be like if you actually had to lay them out yourself but, being a fundamentally upbeat book, it still leaned into the project being a matter of months or years, rather than aeons.

Peter Watts doesn't really do upbeat.

This is the story of the poor bastards sent out from Earth to build the gate network. They're in suspended animation between stops (hence the title), and the book doesn't even really get underway until they've already been gone for millions of years. Every so often, when they open a new gate, they get an intimation of how drastically Earth must have changed since they began, how meaningless their mission must have become in any terms they understand. Some of them are fine with that - they were bred for this, after all, and as per that MJ Hibbett song, it's an opportunity to find out how the story ends (even if you're almost certain not to understand the answer). Others are less so. But when you're that far out, on a ship run by an AI with set mission goals, and you're only awake for a week or two every few millennia, how exactly do you change your situation? Well, there are ways, or at least there may be. But as ever with Watts, the nature of consciousness looms large, and much of the fascination lies in seeing the asymmetric warfare of devious primates versus a computer that's incredibly smart in some ways, entirely dumb in others, and not even really against them, just following the parameters laid out for the mission by engineers as dead at this point as the dinosaurs are to us. As chewy as it is bleak, which is very.

(Netgalley ARC)