Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite: Review by Liz Bourke
Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34224-9, $21.99, 112pp, hc) March 2025. Cover by Feifei Ruan.
Olivia Waite is deservedly well-known, at least among my circles, for her queer historical romances featuring women from a wide range of social classes who overcome obstacles while falling in love with other women. In addition to her skills as a novelist, she is also a talented reviewer with a particular focus on romance novels, whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and the Seattle Review of Books. In Murder by Memory, she has turned the same generosity and incisiveness that characterises so much of her other work to her science fiction debut, presenting a playful hybrid of Golden Age Detective fiction and an entirely novel version of the generation-ship trope that has long been a staple of the genre.
The Fairweather is an interstellar passenger vessel, slowly wending its way between the stars. Its voyage will take many lifetimes, but most of those who set out on the voyage aboard it will see the end: The Fairweather is capable of preserving their memories in the highly shielded Library, and those memories may be placed into new bodies once the passengers’ old ones decline and die – or should some terrible accident befall them. And if they wish to rest, they may remain in the Library for some time between lifetimes.
Dorothy Gentleman is one of the ship’s detectives – a position with no powers of arrest or enforcement, but wide access and latitude to investigate wrongdoing and report her findings to the ship’s committees in charge of restitution. She had been resting peacefully in the Library. But in the middle of a dangerous magnetic storm, she wakes up in a body that isn’t hers – downloaded from a backup she didn’t know about in order to preserve her consciousness when her first backup had been erased. Someone else – someone connected to the body she’s currently wearing – has just been murdered. Dorothy enjoys her work, but when it comes to light that someone has purposefully deleted some minds from the Library – the Library that her brilliant but erratic nephew spends his days trying to improve and protect – she realises that the stakes are more serious than usual.
It is a short novella, so I shall not discuss its events in detail. Let it be enough that Waite plays fair with the mystery: All of the clues to solve it are as available to the reader as to the detective, and all of the characters are sketched in vivid, relatably human colour. It paces itself as a mystery very well.
Dorothy Gentleman recollects Miss Marple while being a rather less conservative and less underestimated figure. The social environment of the Fairweather draws to mind the aesthetics and conventions of politeness of the 1920s, something of a cross between an ocean liner and a large village – though, it seems, somewhat less given to structural oppression than either. Dorothy, like most people, does not concern herself with how the technology that surrounds her works, save where it directly concerns a problem she is trying to solve, and since the novella is told from her perspective, in the first person voice, we see the details of the world as they impinge on her. What society gave birth to the Fairweather we never learn, in the small slice we see: It is not germane to the mystery.
Murder by Memory, for all that it deals with greed and passion, is delightfully light. Playful in tone but serious in aspect, it makes for a refreshing morsel. I look forward to Waite’s return to this setting in the future.
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Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.
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