Just read: Murder by Memory

This years Hugo Awards finalists and winners have been announced, and as I'm always looking for new authors with stories worth my reading time, I ordered a random selection of them as used books. As I don't care much for the books as physical items, getting them used is fine - they will be read in the bathtub anyway.

Murder by Memory is ab interesting 100 page murder mistery novella, maybe in the "cozy" genre of crime fiction. The premise is that the ship detective of a star faring slow ship gets woken up because some backups were destroyed and somebody was murdered. They now have to find the murderer, the motive and also the mechanism.

The book is part one of a three part series. I think it was Charles Stross who wrote that it is basically impossible nowadays to sell a single book, you always have to sell them as a trilogy to a publisher. The other two books are already listed on Amazon but not yet published, or at least, not yet available as used books, so I will stay patient.

Some of the trappings of the story remind me of Altered Carbon, but the story is quite short and fast-paced, so it doesn't hurt too much. The book does not go too deep into the societal consequences of human backups. On the other hand, you would expect most people on a 1000-year voyage to be on board with backups and restoration, in contrast to the larger, and more layered society of Altered Carbon.

There are some things that don't feel sensical to me, but that may be because I think too much about society and money. The ship has a (backed up) population of 10.000 persons, but they seem to have money, huge interest rates and at least one large bank. While I understand that the conceit is to keep people exercising their skills until landfall on a new planet, I don't understand how the interest rates could work like they do in the story. As a mostly stagnant population, I wonder where the need for that much capital and loans goes into, with no economy to grow. But most likely, I'll attribute this criticism to my view of the small population.

Story wise, the book could be double the size, as it has some traces of a longer noir story that aren't followed up on. Maybe it started out as a longer story and was then trimmed back for publication instead of trying to bring it to an Altered Carbon style lobger story. There could be one or two more plot twists to stretch out the story and my instincts led me to suspect deeper machinations to the murder. But the story works as-is , and better a published story that is short than an unpublished story that does not go anywhere, or is too similar to comparable setups like Altered Carbon or Glasshouse .