[book post] The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
Jun. 10th, 2024 03:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaThe jacket copy for this book makes it sound pretty damn compelling:
The setup for the inciting incident is like so:
* Evelyn is a fuckoff hot-shit #girlboss bioscience researcher who's done a bunch of pivotal work in the area of human cloning.
* Her husband Nathan is also a bioscience researcher, but he's more feelsy/needy.
* In particular, he'd kinda like to have a kid sometime, and Evelyn definitely does NOT want that.
* So, Nathan decides to secretly buy a second house, makes a clone of Evelyn, names the clone Martine, and knocks Martine up.
* Evelyn finds out; Nathan moves out; they divorce.
* Later, Martine and Evelyn meet in a cafe; Evelyn is tetchy and bitchy and asks Martine, "what are you even for?" And this question rattles Martine so much that, when she goes home, she asks Nathan what would happen if she didn't want this kid after all, actually—
* And then Nathan declares that she's defective and tries to kill her—
* So then Martine stabs and kills him in self-defense.
* And, not knowing literally anyone else, Martine calls Evelyn to ask for help.
So far so good, but from this point onward, the continuity and/or logic and/or idiot ball errors kept piling up:
* Evelyn and Martine decide to bury the body in the backyard. Which seems a little, uh, yikes-risky (it's unclear on whether there's neighbors who might see? but Evelyn and Martine don't seem to wait until nightfall or anything like that? also the narration seems to imply digging a grave as a lone person is a breezy 1-3 hour task when that is ABSOLUTELY NOT THE CASE??), but I can allow some illogic/panic in the heat of the moment...
* But then Evelyn just... leaves? without her and Martine agreeing on a plan? So there's two weeks where Martine just tells everyone who calls that Nathan's sick, or on a trip to the mountains, and like... man you'd think they'd agree to some kind of story! for consistency's sake yaknow! You obviously can't have a disappearance overlooked forever?
* Anyway, after those two weeks, they decide they need to make a clone of Nathan. Fine, sure. A fun enough premise.
* In the course of the cloning work, we're treated to some pretty good narrative creepiness when we learn that, in the course of her research, Evelyn has done some pretty fucked-up shit to clones. That, in order to shape them toward particular ends, she must "condition" them (break bones, cut them open to make scars, and other forms of violence). And, once a clone has served their purpose, the "specimen" is "neutralized." Clones aren't people, Evelyn sternly tells us.
It's a cool effect... but doesn't seem to hold up to even the minutest amount of scrutiny. Like, I remember the huge moral panic when Dolly the sheep was cloned when I was really little, and that was a fucking sheep. If cloning technology developed to the point where we could clone full-ass humans, with the same age/memories the original had at the time the DNA sample was obtained, like, of course there would be laws around that kind of thing! We have laws for fucking stem cells! Even if we allow there's some kind of radical shift in public opinion that makes it where "oh murdering human clones is 100% fine and 100% mundane and they're 100% not people," I feel like you have to mention that? e.g. just some random sentence that says "after the Clones Are Not People Act of 2040 was passed, discussion of the matter was all but verboten" or whatever.
(More on this later.)
* The book's REALLY inconsistent and vague on what sort of memories and skills clones retain from their original bodies, versus which ones are lost. For instance, when Evelyn asks Martine if she can read, Martine snippily replies of course she can; that's the first thing Nathan taught her. But, later on, when they make a clone-Nathan and send him straight back to his job as a tenured biosciences professor, it... seems to work fine? no one notices any problems? what?
* So when clone!Nathan awakens and asks where his wife is, and then the chapter ends, I thought that was just... them ending the chapter on a "yay the cloning was successful" kind of note?
Except it was NOT meant to read that way; the next chapter opens with Evelyn and Martine freaking out because oh fuck he's asking for his wife, how could we have overlooked this, ah what the fuck is one of us going to have to act like we're his wife and play it cool? And uhh... guys, you literally had full control over all the memories this guy had? I understand you're trying to play it off as a "oh geez" kind of fuckup by lampshading it this way, but the process of making a clone takes months. You had ample time to fucking think this one through, come on.
* Near the end of the book, once Martine has birthed her child and is living with clone!Nathan, Martine discovers twelve other clones of herself, all corpses, buried in the backyard. She and Evelyn deduce that these twelve other women were all "failed" earlier Martines, who were each killed by Nathan when they were found unsuitable in some way.
(which does beg the question of how the fuck did they dig a whole entire grave in that very same backyard for original!Nathan without stumbling on one of these twelve other corpses, how fucking big is this backyard supposed to be, god i know it's a small thing but THESE INCONSISTENCIES JUST KEPT PILING UP...,,,)
Evelyn is, inexplicably, horrified by this. Remember how we were treated, much earlier in the narrative, to Evelyn's unflinching self-justification for why killing clones isn't like killing a person, really?
She hasn't, uh, exactly done a ton of introspection on the flaws in that position. There's no kind of "wow I have been doing the same shitty thing Nathan was doing" kind of revelation. Instead we learn that, see, when Nathan kills clones it's different:
Like, Evelyn was not created in a lab! In all the flashbacks we get of Evelyn and Nathan's relationship, it's honestly usually Evelyn who comes out looking worse—she resents all his bids for attention as him being "needy," and she not only does she not want a kid (which is fine), but shuts him down so hard and fast whenever he mentions wanting one that it, uh, really makes you wonder if she gives a shit about his feelings whatsoever (which is less fine). He's not manipulative or abusive toward her in return. I'd read their thing as a case of unfortunate incompatibility—if one partner wants a kid and the other doesn't, that's just an impasse, right—and of course him making a bunch of clones to replace her is fucked, but we haven't seen her acting awful toward Evelyn in any way, beyond the act of cheating. Seems like a bit of stolen valor, yaknow.
And it's not like Evelyn has much of a revelation later. In the final chapter, when we learn that Evelyn, Martine, and the baby are all living together in the countryside, Evelyn tells us:
What's more clearly spelled out is that, if Martine's existence becomes public, Evelyn's research funding will be in danger because there will be an ethics inquiry of some kind (clones aren't supposed to be able to get pregnant for some reason?). When Evelyn elects to help Martine bury the body, that's pretty much the only reason driving her.
So, gee, how convenient for her that she can continue to keep Martine's existence quiet, but it's fine because she'll "get it figured out" eventually? and meanwhile continue to dodge any comeuppance or consequences for her actions?
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:
* Very early in the book, Evelyn laments that she's stuck with her husband's last name forever, even post-divorce, because they got married so early that all her published work, including her doctoral dissertation, was done under his last name. Later on, we get a lengthy description of her first post-doctoral-thesis job... a year before she met Nathan. That's... not possible? pick one?? (This may seem like a nitpick but it did genuinely throw me. Evelyn's marriage to Nathan was not happy; we get multiple flashbacks to it; and it does color my perception of all those interactions whether she was "cluelessly-madly-in-love-22-year-old" versus "a goddamn PhD who's likely 28-30 and already seen a lot of shit in her line of work." And if the author can't keep that story straight, it doesn't make me super-confident that they have a strong idea what exactly that relationship was like...!)
* Evelyn makes multiple references to how Nathan was too "weak" for industry and cowarded out to academia, and then we find out what he "cowarded" out to was... a tenured professorship? Uh, I don't know... anyone who looks on tenured academia as "lesser than" industry? (More often the opposite, actually?) I couldn't tell if this was meant to just show how much contempt Evelyn had for literally everything Nathan did, or if the author just didn't understand prestige hierarchies in science, or if I was missing something with prestige hierarchies in science (I asked a couple scientist-friends and they were all equally puzzled fwiw).
* Also Evelyn runs her extremely fancy award-winning research lab with... exactly one assistant? lmao
anyway i'm gonna undermine all my credibility by pointing out this book sort of set itself up to answer the "would you fuck your clone" question & it does have some lowkey vibes between Martine and Evelyn & honestly if the book's answer had been "yes absolutely" I would've been like "this book was bad but there was surprising and fun yuri in the end, would read." but it didn't. so: 0/10 on execution, 0/10 on selfcest, all adds up to a would not recommend lol
in conclusion i do not recommend The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
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.Too bad it, uh, almost entirely whiffs the execution!
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.
The setup for the inciting incident is like so:
* Evelyn is a fuckoff hot-shit #girlboss bioscience researcher who's done a bunch of pivotal work in the area of human cloning.
* Her husband Nathan is also a bioscience researcher, but he's more feelsy/needy.
* In particular, he'd kinda like to have a kid sometime, and Evelyn definitely does NOT want that.
* So, Nathan decides to secretly buy a second house, makes a clone of Evelyn, names the clone Martine, and knocks Martine up.
* Evelyn finds out; Nathan moves out; they divorce.
* Later, Martine and Evelyn meet in a cafe; Evelyn is tetchy and bitchy and asks Martine, "what are you even for?" And this question rattles Martine so much that, when she goes home, she asks Nathan what would happen if she didn't want this kid after all, actually—
* And then Nathan declares that she's defective and tries to kill her—
* So then Martine stabs and kills him in self-defense.
* And, not knowing literally anyone else, Martine calls Evelyn to ask for help.
So far so good, but from this point onward, the continuity and/or logic and/or idiot ball errors kept piling up:
* Evelyn and Martine decide to bury the body in the backyard. Which seems a little, uh, yikes-risky (it's unclear on whether there's neighbors who might see? but Evelyn and Martine don't seem to wait until nightfall or anything like that? also the narration seems to imply digging a grave as a lone person is a breezy 1-3 hour task when that is ABSOLUTELY NOT THE CASE??), but I can allow some illogic/panic in the heat of the moment...
* But then Evelyn just... leaves? without her and Martine agreeing on a plan? So there's two weeks where Martine just tells everyone who calls that Nathan's sick, or on a trip to the mountains, and like... man you'd think they'd agree to some kind of story! for consistency's sake yaknow! You obviously can't have a disappearance overlooked forever?
* Anyway, after those two weeks, they decide they need to make a clone of Nathan. Fine, sure. A fun enough premise.
* In the course of the cloning work, we're treated to some pretty good narrative creepiness when we learn that, in the course of her research, Evelyn has done some pretty fucked-up shit to clones. That, in order to shape them toward particular ends, she must "condition" them (break bones, cut them open to make scars, and other forms of violence). And, once a clone has served their purpose, the "specimen" is "neutralized." Clones aren't people, Evelyn sternly tells us.
It's a cool effect... but doesn't seem to hold up to even the minutest amount of scrutiny. Like, I remember the huge moral panic when Dolly the sheep was cloned when I was really little, and that was a fucking sheep. If cloning technology developed to the point where we could clone full-ass humans, with the same age/memories the original had at the time the DNA sample was obtained, like, of course there would be laws around that kind of thing! We have laws for fucking stem cells! Even if we allow there's some kind of radical shift in public opinion that makes it where "oh murdering human clones is 100% fine and 100% mundane and they're 100% not people," I feel like you have to mention that? e.g. just some random sentence that says "after the Clones Are Not People Act of 2040 was passed, discussion of the matter was all but verboten" or whatever.
* The book's REALLY inconsistent and vague on what sort of memories and skills clones retain from their original bodies, versus which ones are lost. For instance, when Evelyn asks Martine if she can read, Martine snippily replies of course she can; that's the first thing Nathan taught her. But, later on, when they make a clone-Nathan and send him straight back to his job as a tenured biosciences professor, it... seems to work fine? no one notices any problems? what?
* So when clone!Nathan awakens and asks where his wife is, and then the chapter ends, I thought that was just... them ending the chapter on a "yay the cloning was successful" kind of note?
Except it was NOT meant to read that way; the next chapter opens with Evelyn and Martine freaking out because oh fuck he's asking for his wife, how could we have overlooked this, ah what the fuck is one of us going to have to act like we're his wife and play it cool? And uhh... guys, you literally had full control over all the memories this guy had? I understand you're trying to play it off as a "oh geez" kind of fuckup by lampshading it this way, but the process of making a clone takes months. You had ample time to fucking think this one through, come on.
* Near the end of the book, once Martine has birthed her child and is living with clone!Nathan, Martine discovers twelve other clones of herself, all corpses, buried in the backyard. She and Evelyn deduce that these twelve other women were all "failed" earlier Martines, who were each killed by Nathan when they were found unsuitable in some way.
(which does beg the question of how the fuck did they dig a whole entire grave in that very same backyard for original!Nathan without stumbling on one of these twelve other corpses, how fucking big is this backyard supposed to be, god i know it's a small thing but THESE INCONSISTENCIES JUST KEPT PILING UP...,,,)
Evelyn is, inexplicably, horrified by this. Remember how we were treated, much earlier in the narrative, to Evelyn's unflinching self-justification for why killing clones isn't like killing a person, really?
She hasn't, uh, exactly done a ton of introspection on the flaws in that position. There's no kind of "wow I have been doing the same shitty thing Nathan was doing" kind of revelation. Instead we learn that, see, when Nathan kills clones it's different:
[The clones] weren't women. They weren't people. They weren't me.Like, this passage is clearly meant to have a mic-drop-like quality but, I dunno, I couldn't help but get pissed at Evelyn somehow making this about her?
They were specimens, subjects, bodies, corpses, cadavers, failures, data points. They were biowaste.
But to Nathan, they had been women.
He hadn't created them with a single function in mind. They weren't there to absorb bullets, grow organs, host experimental therapies. They were supposed to be wives. He had created them to live alongside him. Incomplete lives, maybe, but he probably hadn't seen it that way. He'd bought a house, and clothes, and rose bushes for the garden. He'd been trying to make a home and a life with each one of the clones he built, just like he'd tried to make a home and a life with me.
There wasn't a notebook with my name on it. But the reality was that Nathan hadn't thought of me as a different kind of thing than the specimens he buried in his backyard. To him, we were all iterations of the same experiment. We were all vehicles to carry his dreams.
There hadn't been twelve attempts prior to Martine. There had had been thirteen.
I was his first failure.
Like, Evelyn was not created in a lab! In all the flashbacks we get of Evelyn and Nathan's relationship, it's honestly usually Evelyn who comes out looking worse—she resents all his bids for attention as him being "needy," and she not only does she not want a kid (which is fine), but shuts him down so hard and fast whenever he mentions wanting one that it, uh, really makes you wonder if she gives a shit about his feelings whatsoever (which is less fine). He's not manipulative or abusive toward her in return. I'd read their thing as a case of unfortunate incompatibility—if one partner wants a kid and the other doesn't, that's just an impasse, right—and of course him making a bunch of clones to replace her is fucked, but we haven't seen her acting awful toward Evelyn in any way, beyond the act of cheating. Seems like a bit of stolen valor, yaknow.
And it's not like Evelyn has much of a revelation later. In the final chapter, when we learn that Evelyn, Martine, and the baby are all living together in the countryside, Evelyn tells us:
I don't intend to keep [Martine] hidden away, the way Nathan did. I just don't have a plan yet for how to let her out into the world, for how to give her the freedoms she wants without endangering all of us. I'll get it figured out, though, in time. I just need to focus on my research right now. She understands.It's hard not to read this and think that the logic as inherently self-serving. We're vaguely told that clones legally aren't people and that Martine's existence isn't recorded anywhere, but the worldbuilding is so half-assed we don't have any clear idea of what that means, exactly.
What's more clearly spelled out is that, if Martine's existence becomes public, Evelyn's research funding will be in danger because there will be an ethics inquiry of some kind (clones aren't supposed to be able to get pregnant for some reason?). When Evelyn elects to help Martine bury the body, that's pretty much the only reason driving her.
So, gee, how convenient for her that she can continue to keep Martine's existence quiet, but it's fine because she'll "get it figured out" eventually? and meanwhile continue to dodge any comeuppance or consequences for her actions?
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:
* Very early in the book, Evelyn laments that she's stuck with her husband's last name forever, even post-divorce, because they got married so early that all her published work, including her doctoral dissertation, was done under his last name. Later on, we get a lengthy description of her first post-doctoral-thesis job... a year before she met Nathan. That's... not possible? pick one?? (This may seem like a nitpick but it did genuinely throw me. Evelyn's marriage to Nathan was not happy; we get multiple flashbacks to it; and it does color my perception of all those interactions whether she was "cluelessly-madly-in-love-22-year-old" versus "a goddamn PhD who's likely 28-30 and already seen a lot of shit in her line of work." And if the author can't keep that story straight, it doesn't make me super-confident that they have a strong idea what exactly that relationship was like...!)
* Evelyn makes multiple references to how Nathan was too "weak" for industry and cowarded out to academia, and then we find out what he "cowarded" out to was... a tenured professorship? Uh, I don't know... anyone who looks on tenured academia as "lesser than" industry? (More often the opposite, actually?) I couldn't tell if this was meant to just show how much contempt Evelyn had for literally everything Nathan did, or if the author just didn't understand prestige hierarchies in science, or if I was missing something with prestige hierarchies in science (I asked a couple scientist-friends and they were all equally puzzled fwiw).
* Also Evelyn runs her extremely fancy award-winning research lab with... exactly one assistant? lmao
anyway i'm gonna undermine all my credibility by pointing out this book sort of set itself up to answer the "would you fuck your clone" question & it does have some lowkey vibes between Martine and Evelyn & honestly if the book's answer had been "yes absolutely" I would've been like "this book was bad but there was surprising and fun yuri in the end, would read." but it didn't. so: 0/10 on execution, 0/10 on selfcest, all adds up to a would not recommend lol
in conclusion i do not recommend The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
