★★★☆☆ Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite
A generation ship that transports stored memories
Murder by Memory
Olivia Waite
A generation ship that transports stored memories
Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novella Hugo Award.
☆☆☆☆☆ Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
☆☆☆☆☆ Cinder House by Freya Marske
★★★☆☆ Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
☆☆☆☆☆ The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
★★★☆☆ The Summer War by Naomi Novik
★★★★☆ What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher
Here's the set-up: our hero, Dorothy Gentleman, is a passenger on a generation-ship named Fairweather, nicknamed Ferrie. On this generation ship bodies get old and die. However, each person has a book, stored in the Library, and this book records their mental state at times of their choosing. When a person's body dies, a new body is fabricated and their memories are restored from their Library book. Obviously, in such an environment murder -- i.e. killing a person's body -- is not all that big a deal.
(I'm not sure how having children works. Dorothy has a nephew Rutherford (Ruthie), which means her sister had a son, which means that reproduction can happen, somehow, although I'm not sure if that happened during or before the voyage. This matter is presumably explored in book 2, Nobody's Baby.)
Dorothy is the ship's detective. It's her job to investigate crimes. The story begins with her waking up in a strange body. This is not a thing that it is ever supposed to happen. It transpires that someone has just been murdered, and Ferrie wants an investigation, so she has re-instantiated Dorothy from the Library into a body.
The crime has a lot of moving parts, and I had trouble wrapping my mind around the eventual solution of the mystery. I think we were supposed to be impressed by the novelty of the strangeness of murders in an environment where everyone has a backup, so that murder is a mere temporary inconvenience. It's all very "Cozy Mystery" coded -- yes, there is tea, as well as coffee (no cats, however).
This might have worked, except that many years ago I read the story The Phantom of Kansas by John Varley, based on the same hook, but in an entirely different environment. Also, I'm not a yuge fan of the whole "cozy mystery" phenom.
The upshot is that I was not deeply impressed. I did, however, enjoy it enough that I plan to continue reading the Dorothy Gentleman series.