A Year of Promoting The People Who Make the Things I Love: Jan 3–Mur Lafferty
In 2022, I am going to spend some time each day promoting someone who makes the things I love. I started this series because I believe that we, myself included, spend so much time on social media dunking on people (however deserved) and not enough time lifting up people deserving of positive attention.
Today’s focus is the writer and podcaster Mur Lafferty.
A couple years ago, I was given the opportunity to create a sci-fi course for senior English at my school. I’ve always loved sci-fi as a genre, but I wasn’t very up to date on current sci-fi book, so I asked my friend Josh (whose book reviews you should definitely follow as well!)
He reads a ton of new sci-fi every year, and he highly recommended Lafferty’s book Six Wakes. I read it in two sittings. I could not stop until I knew what happened.
This Hugo nominated book does two things very well. First it sets up a “whodunnit” mystery in deep space aboard a generational colonization starship. When the story begins, all six members of the Dormire’s crew are murdered or incapacitated.
The second thing the book does very well is to raise questions about the ethics of cloning. Because the six members of the Dormire are clones, and new clones are being woken up. The newly woken clones will have to solve the mystery of the murders as well as many more mysteries because they’ve also lost their memories of a LONG period of time.
I don’t want to say more because there are so many great surprises in store for you if you read this book. It’s so good that I made it the core novel for my sci-fi class.
I’m trying to keep these write-ups short, but I have to mention that Lafferty has written other amazing books, and she is also a Hugo award winning podcaster. So take a look at her link page to see how else you can follow and support her.
Update: I decided to buy her book I Should Be Writing: A Writer’s Workshop on Kindle. My goal this year is to finally write that novel I’ve wanted to write my whole life, so I’m very much looking forward into diving into this.
