Peter Watts’ THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION is delightfully suspenseful

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Cover by Elizabeth Story

At EVERYTHING2, Dustyblue praises Peter Watt’s THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION.

This book is a real thriller. It mixes a sort of psychological agoraphobia and claustrophobia into one setting in a ship that is at once to big and empty and stifling. Chimp is a monomaniacal and engaging antagonist. He isn’t cruel or selfish. He’s just a machine trying to do his job. He’s not smart. He has nearly unlimited surveillance powers. The whole scenario is delightfully suspenseful and made even better by the relationship between Sunday and Chimp. They are almost friends and Chimp expresses fondness for her. Is it real feeling or applied psychology? There’s just no way to know and the question gnaws even even as she prepares to betray the mission. Since this is a Watts book we aren’t guaranteed a happy ending. Humanity, Fuck Yeah! aficionados will walk away confused about whether this story was for them since the whole mess was engineered by folks on Earth so long ago. It’s a story about the unbroken human spirit but it doesn’t portray it as an unalloyed good. If dark science fiction with a strong first person narrative appeals to you give THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION a read.

The French site LES BLABLAS DE TACHAN usually doesn’t like hard science fiction, but they really enjoyed Eriophora, the French edition of THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION.

As far as I am concerned, I really liked this short reading, however rather dense, where finally the hard science decor was indeed quite affordable because popularized by the author for novices like me. I was much more carried away by Sunday’s trajectory and the reflections that it prompts to have on our relationship with AI but also with industry and at work, which were for me the heart of this story. This reading was therefore a little favorite!

Translation from French courtesy of Google

At REDDIT r/printSF, the book gets a favorable mention.

You would definitely like THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION by Peter Watts. It involves the main character leapfrogging literally millions of years and waking for only days at a time. They then have to plan a revolution under these circumstances. It’s very interesting.

OrthogonalBestSeries, IMHO, King’s 11/22/63 as a time travel story is not great. Can we post and discuss good time travel fiction? Dissenting opinions welcome.