Jeff Koeppen's Reviews > The Downloaded

This is one of the shorter Robert J Sawyer novels I've read which resulted in the characters not being as fleshed out but the premise was really interesting and I'm always interested in a good post-apocalyptic book. And Sawyer's prose is always smooth and easy to digest. I think he's one of the top science fiction writers currently.

This was a freebie on Audible, and was a full-cast production complete with background sound effects. Brendan Fraser was the main narrator and he was fantastic. Overall, I liked it, and give it 3.5 stars. The ending felt a little hand-waving to me and some of the bad-guy characters seemed a bit over the top. It seemed like they were always swearing in the background which got old. The paperback isn't out yet, but it might be interesting to read it and compare how the story feels on paper rather than a full cast production. And what's with future people and their fascination with movies that were popular in my time? The beginning of this novel was set in 2059 and the people 36 years in the future are still fascinated in the same classic movies and pop culture as me? Wasn't there anything super popular with catchy quotes made in their lifetimes?

The gist of the novel: In 2059 two groups of people are put in to cryonic suspension in a facility in Canada. One group are astronauts who are about to leave Earth on a mission to colonize another planet and the second group are a bunch of convicted murders who volunteer to serve their time virtually to shorten their physical sentences. While they are "asleep" a cataclysmic event occurs and the astronauts never leave Earth, and they and the criminals in cryosleep are frozen for an additional 500 years. They all wake up at the same time and you can imagine the conflict and drama which unfolds between the highly educated and trained astronauts and knuckle-dragging (some psychotic) murderers. To top it off, there is another earthly crisis forthcoming and the twenty-first century humans have some interesting visitors.

The novel is told through a series of interviews with a number major characters which I thought worked well. The reader doesn't find out who the interviewee is until late in the novel. Good stuff. Robert Sawyer fans will enjoy this but maybe wish it was a 500 pager.