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41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mind and body, April 8, 2007
You have to be a certain age before you will consider whether you want to be young again and live your life again. Sarah and Don are octogenarians and, after a full and contented life with children and grandchildren, have options to change their lives that we rarely dream of. However, Sarah, Dr. Halifax, is not just anybody. She is a well-known scientist who, back in 2009, had deciphered the first message from Sigma Draconis, a star system some nineteen light years away from Earth. Now, thirty-eight years later, the response to Earth's message is received and nobody can break the encryption code. Can Sarah do it again and will she live long enough to make it happen?
Cody McGavin, chief of a robotics company and always on the lookout for new technological discoveries is one the richest people around. He is convinced that Sarah is vital to decoding the message now and also for future message exchanges with "her Dracon pen pal". It is 2048 and, thanks to a process of DNA resequencing and some other "tuck" jobs, it has become possible to literally roll back a person's biological body to the prime of their life, around age 25. The procedure is experimental and only for the super-rich, like McGavin himself. He is willing to pay for Sarah to have this chance at another lifespan. It's not something she accepts lightly, insisting that her husband of 60 years, Don, is included in the offer. They both undergo the procedure which is successful for Don but not for her.
While in Sawyer's previous bestseller, Mindscan, life could be extended thanks to copying a complete brain map onto the bionic body, in Rollback advances in medicine are the solution. Here the ethical question is not so much who is the real person, but how do you harmonize an octogenarian brain with a 25-year old physique? Can you relive your life without stumbling over history? How do grandchildren deal with a grandfather who is much younger than their own parents? How do friends and former colleagues react? And, above all, how does this gap influence the relationship between husband and wife? Can it survive at all?
Leave it to Robert Sawyer to pack his speculative fiction with deep philosophical questions and topics for debate. Rejuvenation is but one of these. If humans can recreate themselves to live, maybe forever, are humans in fact playing God? How do people and societies cope with that? Cosmic communication is another major theme. The first message that Sarah had decoded was in effect a detailed questionnaire about Earth's peoples' perspectives on life and society. Why do they want to know? What do you tell aliens about human society? Do you tell the truth or do you present Earth in the best light possible? How to answer moral and philosophical conundrums? The range of the Dracons' questions probe deeply into the human psyche, testing its integrity.
The narrative moves between timelines of 2048, to previous milestones in the couple's life, mostly through Don's pondering his memories. There was Sarah's work with the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project that led to the first transmission from Earth into the universe. Her discovery of the code that deciphered the Sigma Draconis message and the complex organization of the reply. Don, a TV and radio producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), was a good and patient dialogue partner for his wife. Through their conversations, played back in Don's mind, the reader can follow multiple strands of arguments about the worth of SETI, astronomy, genetics and more.
Sawyer has referred to Rollback as a "phi-fi" novel - a philosophical novel. The book's events are strongly anchored in current scientific knowledge. It speculates on possible future scenarios in fields like medicine and inter-stellar communication. Yet, this is also very much a human interest story. Sawyer has created memorable characters and realistic environments in which their lives unfold. It will fascinate the fan of Sawyer's sci-fi books as much as the general reader who is interested in a well written story that raises questions some of which we might pose ourselves already today. [Friederike Knabe]
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33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A huge disappointment, June 5, 2007
I found this book to be a huge disappointment. I had never read Sawyer before, but after hearing him interviewed on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and reading about all the awards he has won, I expected much more. My appetite was also whetted by the intrinsically interesting themes -- rejuvenation, alien encounters, and ethics.
But Sawyer doesn't deliver. His characters that are drawn so shallowly that it's hard to develop any interest in them. And what we do find, especially in the person of Don Halifax, is a curious inconsistency. On the one hand we're supposed to believe sympathetically that he is at heart a nice guy, a good man, a human being who makes forgivable mistakes. But in fact most of the time he behaves like a jerk. He snaps at people; he cheats on his wife; he's dishonest; he's self-centered. This is a great guy?
Also annoying are the numerous little speeches that the characters make. Few people talk like that in real life. It's especially unnatural when Don and his wife, Sarah, converse about big ideas. They sound like two people in a panel discussion rather than a husband and wife chatting. This is symptomatic of a larger problem with the book: it's sprinkled with mini-essays on a variety of topics. Some readers may find these digressions interesting, but in most cases they do little to advance the story. Their chief purpose seems to be to demonstrate the author's broad command of factoids.
A few minor quibbles: There are several plot points that I expected would lead to a twist or turn, but no, they're left undeveloped. The Atkins diet is promoted shamelessly. The sex scenes are laughably flat and two-dimensional -- obviously not Sawyer's forte. Similarly, in an attempt to infuse some feeling, he throws in a little poetry here and there, but it just doesn't work.
On the positive side, I do give Sawyer credit for a simple, easy-to-read prose style. Except for the intrusive little essays, readers will find that the narrative moves along very well. If you want a light read, enjoy tangential topics, and aren't concerned about character depth, you may find this book worthwhile.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Philosophiction" at its best, April 19, 2007
Serendipitously, I read most of this book on my 62nd birthday It could not have been a more appropriate read. First of all, I "enjoyed" it tremendously, if "enjoy" is the correct term for a story that made me cry so often. However, the philosophical questions and issues in this book resonated tremendously with me, even the ones that were not age-related, such as the questions of the value of a life. This type of character-driven story where real people face important life questions that are familiar to current-day readers in a context involving some kind of scientific breakthrough is just the kind of writing Sawyer does best, and he really outdid himself this time.
He neatly missed several chances to make this a pretty bad book. For an example, Peter F. Hamilton, who has written some enjoyable books, wrote a totally DREADFUL novel called Misspent Youth about the effects a man's rejuvenation has on him and the people around him. Sawyer avoided all of his mistakes.
Many writers today seem so pessimistic that it would have been easy to make the book a "downer". For example, I was very sad when one of the main characters died, but it was very consoling that the character died having accomplished a dream in life. That is all anyone today can hope for, so it seems like a pretty good second prize to me, if you miss the "brass ring" of successful rollback.
WARNING: The rest of this review contains what some may consider a "spoiler".
Sawyer could have turned Halifax's affair into something sordid, a rejuvenated man "feeling his oats", and I am glad he didn't do that, either. The story of a decent, ethical husband who is unfaithful to his wife because of very unusual circumstances and how everyone concerned deals with that is much more interesting.
I loved the robot, and I mourned and truly respected his sacrifice---would that all humans were so decent!
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