Restoration

I loved this book. An interesting premise, I liked the characters and their interaction with each other. Once I’d finished reading it left me pondering what it would be like to wake up in another body. Five stars from me.

I really enjoyed the book. I found the concept of the book fascinating and believable. The plot was very fast paced and had many twists and turns. McWhorter has written an interesting novel.

It is always a pleasure to encounter some serious, hard-core science fiction, full of speculation about our place in the stars, where humans meld with machines, about the locus of consciousness within a future technology, and so on. This one has it all.

The prologue begins with dying magnate, Evan Feldman, attended by his daughter yLilly, and her husband. His cancer has got the better of him, even whilst still only in his fifties.

Feldman dies, and his daughter is to discover that there things her father never told her - mainly about his cryogenic suspension. Fast forward again and this time, her granddaughter Aubrey secretly pulls her grandfather's Mo d and psyche back into a new, cloned body for a purpose she is loth to tell him about too soon.

Actually, not so secret. For there are spies everywhere, out to make sure the multinationals who have spread their culture not just on the Moon but on Mars and various asteroids too, don't clone dead people: It's is strictly illegal. Feldman and his helpers are forced to take a rocket plane to the Moon to escape their enemies, but when Luna proves to be too hot for them, they head for Mars and then Ceres - their pursuers never less than a couple of moves away. And needless to say, phasers are not always set at stun.

Geeks might well enjoy the details given about gravity propulsion regarding the new rocket science, while this reader might well have been more interested in how Lunar and Martian society have evolved - but this writer does not allow the action to stop here. For the race is on to take future survivors to a new destination altogether - if they don't get killed first.

Within all the adventure and espionage emerges yet another interesting character, the android Christian. Yet even here, the pace of the story does not fixate on the whole Pinocchio theme of that one, but rather, what happens if consciousness might be able to inhabit more than one body.

As with certain other kinds of speculation where no one has gone before, there is the question too of what role humanity as it now stands, lies within this. Possibly not much.

There are twists aplenty in the telling here, with some individuals definitely not being all they seem at all, and suspension is craftily built up from the adventure point of view.

It will be interesting to see where this writer takes all of this in the next editions of this story.

this was a great start to a series, the characters were great and I really thought the author did a good job in introducing the world.