I figured it would be heavily regulated because of the chances of abuse. A lot of cloning stories treat cloning as something that happens to a small group of people, but I wondered what happened if cloning were widespread. But I did try to come up with a realistic legal response to cloning. Technologically, I went fictional for the purpose of the story. In deciding how cloning would work, did you base it on how cloning has worked in real life or a fictional description?

But the work by Kim Stanley Robinson and Connie Willis probably were the most influential.Īs you said, cloning is a big part of the story. As for sci-fi influences, it’s harder to say as I’ve read a lot more sci-fi books than mystery, so there have been a lot of subtle influences throughout my life. I read a lot of Agatha Christie in research for this novel and tried to study how she put together her mysteries. Given that Six Wakes is a sci-fi mystery, what do you consider to be the biggest influences on the sci-fi aspects, and what do you feel are the biggest influences on the mystery aspects? The video game FTL uses cloning in a way that got me thinking, however, and the concept of using cloning to extend life instead of making multiples of oneself is one that I took straight into Six Wakes. It’s hard to say, I got inspiration from many places. A skeleton starship crew wakes up in newly cloned bodies and have to figure out their own murders, knowing that one of their own crew did it. Six Wakes is a clone murder mystery in space.

Let’s start at the beginning: What is Six Wakes about? It’s those latter kinds of questions that inspired aspects of Mur Laffery’s new sci-fi murder mystery novel Six Wakes ( paperback, digital, audiobook), as you’ll see in the following interview. But all of these discussions have been about whether human cloning should or should not be allowed, not what happens when it does. While human cloning hasn’t been perfected, yet, it’s still a controversial topic that’s inspired moral, ethical, and spiritual debates.

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty