tl;dr

The hard science and big ideas complement, rather than overwhelm, the engaging plot.

opening remarks

I usually run a mile from hard science fiction, but Peter Watts is an exception.  Yes, his prose is dense and information heavy, but he’s also thought-provoking, asking questions, pushing hard against a reader’s preconception of reality.  I’ve been looking forward to The Freeze-Frame Revolution since it was announced.

knee-jerk observations

This is how Watts does exposition.  A mix of technical jargon and vernacular.  It’s matter of fact, almost blasé but informative.

Sunday Ahzmundin and a crew of about thirty-thousand are onboard a spaceship, built into an asteroid, constructing warp gates across the Milky Way.  Based on relative time they’ve been travelling for 65 million years, of which they’ve been awake for a tiny percentage.  The crew have literally slept through millennia.  It’s an awesome and terrifying idea, a one way trip for near on eternity.  Lian, Sunday’s friend, believes that the civilisation they’re building these warp gates for are long dead, so she wants to take back control of the ship.

Even if autonomy on a floating rock is pointless, it’s better than the aimless pursuit of building warp gates.

It’s interesting to note that (a) the crew were designed at a young age to be suited for the voyage and (b) they’ve travelled so far, and for so long there’s a small chance the crew may see the ‘outlines’ of the heat death of the Universe.

Three thousand people ‘decommissioned’ because the AI needed to find a safe and secret spot for its archive.  Now that’s brutal.

“… collaborators in the ultimate adventure.”

Both Watts and the narrator Sunday underplay the fact that every so often, after building and initialising a gate, a many-tentacled horror, or similar abomination, attempts to force its way through the newly formed aperture.  Only on a couple of occasions has the ship been under any real danger, still referring to these creatures as gremlins makes out that they’re a nuisance rather than a nightmare of cosmic proportions.

The Gist Of It

My impression of Peter Watts’ work, having read two of his novels, is a science fiction writer firmly devoted to big ideas underpinned by cutting-edge science.  There’s a density, complexity and take no prisoner attitude to his work that makes it sometimes hard for me to embrace the story Watts is trying to tell.  That was my problem with his last novel, Echopraxia, where the sheer weight of ideas overwhelmed the plot.  I didn’t have that issue with The Freeze Frame Revolution. It certainly aims for a sense of wonder – a starship of 30,000 people who have spent millions of years circling the galaxy constructing warp gates – and there’s definitely a great deal of theoretical physics and science supporting the narrative, but this time the concepts and the story bounce nicely off each other, resulting in a plot that’s immensely engaging.

The novella or short novel format compels Watts to be lean and mean with his storytelling.  Even when he’s explaining warp-gates, how the different crews on the ship interact, the nuances of the AI that runs the whole shebang, he never wanders far from the central core of the story – a mutinous crew playing a cat and mouse game with a single-minded AI over the course of centuries.  The fact that Sunday Ahzmundin is a fantastic character – she’s smart but conflicted – makes it all the more satisfying.

Like all good science fiction, Watts uses the big ideas to discuss freedom, agency and purpose.  In particular, the novella critiques capitalism, especially regarding the value or cost-benefit of a single person when compared against the significance of the mission and limited resources (this leads to one of the more chilling scenes in the book).  Most importantly though, The Freeze-Frame Revolution is a great deal of fun* to read.

*I mean yeah it’s disturbing and creepy and dark, but I class those things as fun.