[book post] The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

The jacket copy for this book makes it sound pretty damn compelling:

Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell's award-winning research. She's patient and gentle and obedient. She's everything Evelyn swore she'd never be.

And she's having an affair with Evelyn's husband[, Nathan].

Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up.

Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.

Too bad it, uh, almost entirely whiffs the execution!

The setup for the inciting incident is like so:

( Read more... )

So far so good, but from this point onward, the continuity and/or logic and/or idiot ball errors kept piling up:

( Read more... )

The implications of this are vastly more monstrous than I think Gailey actually realizes.

It all wound up giving me the same kind of heebie-jeebies that that damn Becky Chambers book did. It's the same fundamentally fickle way in which people are classed as either Elect or Damned. Ugh. Ugh!

Anyway.

The book is vague about all this shit because at the end of the day Gailey does not want to write a science-fiction novel. Gailey wants to write a sort of wee-woo metaphor for "what if your life was totally different and/or the circumstances you were raised under were totally different." (The narrative's at its strongest whenever we flash back to Evelyn's childhood, where we see the ways in which her doormat mother and her cruel father shaped the person she's become.)

And there's abundant precedent for good scifi-as-metaphor, scifi-as-thought-experiment, scifi-that-is-deliberately-handwaving-the-actual-science. But (but!!!), you can't do this wibbly-wobbly halfway thing. You can't gesture vaguely at stuff like "legally clones aren't people" and not actually examine the obvious implications of that premise. You don't have to mire yourself in the science-y gobbledegook, it doesn't have to be the focus of your story, but you do have to know the answers and be consistent about it. (Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain, for an off-the-top-of-my-head example, clearly mostly wants to examine the relationship between two sisters, but all the science and societal stuff is deftly and confidently and concisely addressed.) Or you just never mention any of that stuff because of the questions it invites. In-between is the danger zone!

I mean, did this bug anyone else? I felt like I was going crazy skimming the Goodreads reviews for this thing; couldn't seem to find anyone QUITE as vexed as I was.

Anyway, here's a bunch of other inconsistencies that drove me crazy but didn't fit neatly in the regaling-the-plot outline above:

( Read more... )