Peter Watts' THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION

I love generation spaceship stories, but perhaps even more so I love the idea that a crew, using whatever science-fantastical suspended animation technology combined with science-fantastical light-speed or faster travel, can live for centuries, millennia, or, in this case, spans of time that make geologic time seem like the blink of a may-fly's eye. Especially when they're written by masters like Alastair Reynolds, or, in this case, Peter Watts.

In The Freeze-Frame Revolution, a genetically engineered offshoot of the human race called "Spores" that I can't help but compare to the nebbishes of T.J. Bass' Half-Past Human and The Godwhale (and perhaps prefigured by the early Genesis scorcher "Get 'Em Out by Friday") are on a galaxy-spanning mission to build "gates" so that the rest of humanity doesn't have to spend thousands of years in hibernation between work days, just to travel between stars. As the story opens, the Eriophora*, her A.I. pilot known as the Chimp, and a crew of 30,000 Spores have been on this mission for some six million years.

Our heroine, Sunday Ahzmundin, is wrapping up a shift awake with a few other members of her "tribe" (the designers of the mission having kept an idea similar to good old Dunbar's Number in mind while establishing its sociology) when one of them has a full-on mental and emotional breakdown, fixated on the idea that the mission for which they were bred has been a failure for all that thousands and thousands of gates have been built, because when was the last time they had any contact with any humans other than themselves? And also, sometimes, when a gate is brought online, various dangers lurk on its other side, ready to attack. Sunday gets her to settle down and get in her coffin and writes it off as something like Spaaaaace Madness (you coveteth my ice cream bar!) It's only after Sunday has been through another long sleep that she learns that her friend and crewmate who freaked out was awake during the only known attack on the ship that actually did damage. D'oh.

The rest of the story unfolds a few days at a time over the course of more millennia, as Sunday, who has always had a closer-than-usual relationship with The Chimp to the degree that Sunday gets awakened with greater frequency than pretty much anyone else when there's a problem The Chimp can't quite handle alone, starts piecing together enough unpleasant facts about the reality of their mission, its parameters, and how reliable The Chimp's memory and personality really are, to reach the conclusion that not only is an extremely slow-motion revolution absolutely necessary but has already been going on!

The conspiracy that unfolds/is constructed is the coolest thing about this very cool novella, as Sunday discovers the ingenous ways its members have developed to communicate with each other across the eons, and how some of them have managed to hide and stay awake to steer their plan through its final stages.

The audio book, as narrated by Emily Woo Zeller, carries an emotional wallop that I think it would be easy to miss in print. Zeller emotes all over the place; some have complained about this, but I think this adds a necessary depth and urgency to the characters/ predicament, so if you're going to check out this nifty little gem, I highly recommend doing so this way.

A devastating few hours of goodness await.

*A hollowed out asteroid straight outta Book of the Long Sun, iykwim. In fact, this is a lot like a condensed and more traditionally science fictional version of Book of the Long Sun!