This is my first review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Wakers of the Cryocrypt by Nathan Kuzack (author site here). Nathan is offering this book for free through Google Books here. It’s also available on Amazon and Apple Books.

Blurb

A thought-provoking post-apocalyptic story about an unexpected reunion between humankind and the AIs it created.

In a world full of living machines one man may die… again.

The future. The human race is extinct. Earth is ruled by eltecs, descendants of the AIs humans created before their demise.

While searching for prehistoric cave paintings, two eltec explorers discover a hidden cryogenic crypt containing 23 perfectly preserved human bodies frozen inside crystal columns.

As eltec society argues over who might have built the crypt and what to do with it, one of its occupants is restored to life. Human beings are no longer extinct, but, for reasons of their own, not every eltec wants to see them come back. The only living human on Earth is in terrible danger.

My review

I enjoyed my time with this book. It was creative, exciting, featured a richly-imagined future world, and dealt with moral and ethical issues in an interesting way.

Plot and Characters

The story centers on several main characters, adopting their point of view or an omniscient point of view at various points. The human protagonist is a man given the name Lazarus. He awakes from a mysterious tomb (the cryocrypt) into a far-future, post-human world populated by sentient robots called Eltecs.

The Eltecs, descendants of human robotics and AI technology, live in a low-population utopian society goverened by a set of uber-intelligences. Even in their utopian future, they are factionalists. Some are fans of humanity, adopting human-like form and wearing clothes. Others are anti-humanity, adopting odd and unnatural shapes. All are protected from death by a cloning system that recreates and reloads them if they are destroyed, a la Paranoia.

Humanity has been dead for over ten thousand years, so the discovery of Laz and twenty-two other humans in the crypt, perfectly preserved, is a tremendously significant event. The Eltecs frequently cluck their steely tongues at humanity’s base, self-destructive instincts that led humanity to perish in an environmental and political cataclysm leading to a nuclear war long ago.

Thrust into this odd society, like an 18th-century savage brought back by colonialist explorers, Laz struggles to learn and adjust. He is afflicted by a mysterious amnesia, which prevents him from remembering his past life, although he seems well-versed in 21st century society and customs.

All of the above is established quickly, in the first few chapters, and the rest of the book is a tale, sometimes political, sometimes introspective, sometimes high-octane adventure, of Laz struggling to figure out who he is, why and how he was placed in this crypt, and how he will fit into Eltec society. His Eltec allies are often perspective characters, and their musings on Laz and their own society are interesting and robust. I don’t want to spoil the plot, which is fun, so I will leave the plot summary there.

My thoughts

As I was reading this, I was reminded a great deal of the many original-series Star Trek episodes where Kirk and Bones and Spock discover a planet living with very different social rules, often derived from 20th century America. Our brave Starfleet visitors have to figure out how the society works, and often what is wrong with it, before judging them, punching some people, kissing others, and flying away 43 minutes later. This absolutely isn’t a diss – I loved those episodes – but there’s a parallel there.

I was also reminded of fables or parables, stories told to explore moral issues. There’s a lot of judginess in many of the characters, and moral flaws and collective guilt are frequent concerns. The language of the book fits this style as well, with characters often ruminating about the sins of the past (or present), sometimes in bold declarative sentences.

To me, the main character’s amnesia didn’t seem necessary, although it’s explained and justified as the story progresses. It was a little tropey, and I don’t think the story would have been too different had he known he were a blacksmith or a baker or whatever. It did give him a constant sense of not knowing himself, which worked, but it also made him a limited character. There are books and shows where that trope is used better, The Bourne Identity being a big one, where hidden skills and connections are discovered, but Laz didn’t seem to have any of these. A new TV show I like, Doc, has amnesia as a central theme, and even though it’s a cheesy plot device, they’re deploying it well and capitalizing on the main character’s alienation from her past self as she learns more about it.

The book got more action-packed as it went on, which was fine and exciting, but the main human character lacked agency and control throughout the whole thing, leaving him subject to the manipulations and machinations (get it?) of his tormentors. The ending, in particular, seemed like a place where he and his friends were far more spectators than protagonists, and I wasn’t a big fan of that choice. This was the book’s biggest disappointment for me, although as an author, I certainly know it can be hard to stick the landing. I actually thought the Eltec characters, especially Shulvara, were more both more interesting and more capable characters, and I’d have preferred to spend more time in their chrome crania rather than in Laz’s largely empty one.

One quibble for me was the Eltec society and speech. Despite being robots from the future, they spoke very much like 21st-century humans, even to the point of using “gonna” and “wanna” frequently, which grated. They also used 21st-century idioms frequently (e.g. something up my sleeve) which seemed out of place for sentient robots in the 33rd century. Their culture and personalities were also very human-seeming, which added to the Star Trek/parable feel but which seemed a little jarring to me, who would expect the Eltec society to have evolved into something more different in 12,000 years.

There was also some odd fixation on sex, even from the robots, and some repeated male gaze from Laz towards a fellow crypt resident. Even the robots got into ogling people sometimes, apparently totally on board with a 21st-century standard of Hot-or-Not. I’m not a prude at all, but this seemed out of place. It totally wasn’t a big deal, not frequent, and didn’t detract, but the few mentions of orgasms and cocks and lust and such didn’t (for me) fit the nature or tone of the rest of the story, which was closer to classic sci-fi and focused on other, cooler things.

The POV was not quite fixed, sometimes restricted to one character, sometimes omniscient with thoughts from all of them, sometimes party to observing events none of the main characters could see, and it sometimes floated from one to the other within a paragraph or two. It was a little fuzzy – not bad, but as an author who worries about that stuff, I couldn’t help but take note.

Summation

This was a good book, often exciting, thought-provoking, funny, and emotional, with a creative future world to explore and a lot of moral questions to think about. Kuzack should be proud of what he’s done with it. It well-deserves its quarterfinal spot in the SPSFC. Because it’s the first of our quarterfinalists I’ve read, I don’t have a real sense of how it will stack up against those others, but I recommend it, especially if you liked those old Star Trek morality plays.