Rollback is not 'the winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel' as the cover deceptively implies. That's because it isn't a very impressive novel at all. With all the hype for Robert Sawyer (his author bio is page and a half list of his writing awards) I started reading Rollback with pretty high expectations. It was wholly mediocre.
Rollback was surprisingly hard to judge. I felt that it was doing the right things often as far characterization and world building while disliking the book at the same time. My conclusion then is that the author knows all sorts of good literary tricks but is, in this case at least, too inept to pull them off properly. For example, the main character makes bad puns and jokes throughout the book showing that he is clever and silly. Except that the jokes are so awkward and bad that the reader never thinks of the main character as really having those attributes. Rollback is a small, human-scale story so it's not exactly action packed. The stakes in this novel are high only if you are invested in the characters. Sci-fi can afford to have flat characters and dull settings if the ideas and action are big enough. It's not ideal of course, but it can at least make for an interesting/fun book. Small scale stories however really rely on their characters and having a truly compelling setting. Rollback suffers from having rather uninteresting people in a bland suburban setting.*
Donald Hailfax is an eighty year old who lives with his wife of sixty years Sarah. Thirty years ago Sarah, a SETI researcher, decoded an alien message and sent a reply. A response from the aliens arrives and a rich philanthropist offers to 'rollback' the elderly couple, returning them to the age of twenty five. The assumption is that the aliens will want to keep talking with the same person as before thus Sarah is too important to die of old age. They go through with the procedure but it only works on Don. The rest of the book follows Don as he puzzles out what to do with his second life.
This book is interested in several things:
-SETI. At one point the book talks about the movie Contact which is bold since Rollback's plot immediately reminded me of Contact. To be fair there's not many different plots you can have about SETI- it really only does one thing, talk to aliens. Sadly in 2011 SETI is not doing well.
-serve as a soapbox for the author. One can argue that every novel does this. But in Rollback there are sections that are simply Robert Sawyer talking philosophy, aliens, or morality. Sure it's put in the form of two characters talking but these little discussions are blatant editorializing. Then there are the references throughout the book to the Atkins diet. Did you know Robert Sawyer was once fat but now, with daily exercise and avoiding carbs, is at a healthy weight? I knew, and I didn't need to do anything more than read this book!
You can see from his jowls this man was once large
-establishing the characters and setting as realistic by having them talk about Seinfeld and Star Trek. Done well I imagine this tactic could work well. In Rollback these pop culture references feel forced every time.
In summary, Rollback is a bland book. Robert Sawyer tried to write a warm hearted character driven story but he just doesn't quite make it. I agreed with many of the authors opinions and Canada of 2048 will probably be just as this book predicts: much like Canada of today except with better TV. So Rollback is actually something I want to like. But I can't get over way Sawyer forces his (admittedly good) viewpoint on the reader and the beige setting and plot. Rollback receives no response from the aliens of Draconis (that was the rating).
PS- Donate your computer's free time at: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
*News from 2048: Canada Still Boring
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