ARC Review: The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts

The Freeze-Frame Revolution

Author: Peter Watts

Genre: Science Fiction, Fiction

Series: Sunflower Cycle

Publisher: Tachyon Publications

Page Number: 192 pages

View on Goodreads

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She believed in the mission with all her heart.

But that was sixty million years ago.

How do you stage a mutiny when you’re only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what best for you?

Sunday Ahzmundin is about to find out.

MY REVIEW

I received a free copy for an honest review.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution is an incredibly intelligent book with extremely in-depth character and a story-line that actually makes you think, and it’s a book that when I read it, the entire time I’m just thinking “this is what science fiction look like”.

What made this book really unique in my opinion is how the writer combined his hilarious writing style with some very serious scientific facts. This not only helps the reader better understand the narrator when they’re explaining something but ultimately help put the book in a more interesting light and more fun to read. I also really appreciate how short this book is because with that much intelligence, this book had the perfect length for not completely depriving the reader of their attention by being like 500 pages.

I strongly recommend people who are craving science fiction, and just some true intelligence in their novels. I myself understand this better than anyone because there are so many examples out there that the science fiction…just doesn’t feel challenging enough.

Follow Sunday on a short but fully-packed story that will literally teach you so much about biology, science, and astronomy. This is a very underrated book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PETER WATTS is an awk­ward hy­brid of bi­ol­o­gist, sci­ence-fic­tion au­thor, and (ac­cord­ing to the US De­part­ment of Home­land Se­cu­rity) con­victed felon/tew­wow­ist. In ad­di­tion to a num­ber of ac­co­lades for sci­ence fic­tion, he has won minor awards in fields as di­verse as ma­rine mam­mal re­search and video doc­u­men­tary. None of these have gone to his head since they never in­volved a lot of cash.

Watts’ first book (Starfish) was a NY Times No­table Book, while his sixth (Blind­sight)—a philo­soph­i­cal ru­mi­na­tion on the na­ture of con­scious­ness with an un­healthy focus on space vam­pires—has be­come a core text in di­verse un­der­grad­u­ate courses rang­ing from phi­los­o­phy to neu­ropsych, and is ru­mored to have ended up in the oc­ca­sional Real Neuro Lab. It also made the final bal­lot for a shit­load of do­mes­tic genre awards in­clud­ing the Hugo, win­ning ex­actly none of them (al­though it con­tin­ues to win awards over­seas, seven years later). This may re­flect a cer­tain crit­i­cal di­vide re­gard­ing Watts’ work in gen­eral; his bi­par­tite novel βehe­moth, for ex­am­ple, was praised by Pub­lisher’s Weekly as an “adren­a­line-charged fu­sion of Clarke’s The Deep Range and Gib­son’s Neu­ro­mancer”, while being si­mul­ta­ne­ously de­cried by Kirkus as “ut­terly re­pel­lent… hor­rific porn”. Watts hap­pily em­braces the truth of both views, al­though age may have mel­lowed his out­look some­what; as of this writ­ing the ad­vance re­views for Echopraxia have begun trick­ling in, and even Kirkus ap­pears to be en­am­ored.

Watts’ work is avail­able in 20 lan­guages. De­scribed by the Globe & Mail as “one of the very best [hard-sf writ­ers] alive”, the over­all ef­fect of his prose is per­haps best summed up by critic James Nicoll, quoted above.

Peter Watts is actually a lot more cheer­ful than you might ex­pect.