Sarah and Don Halifax are the main ingredients to Rollback a Science Fiction novel by Robert J. Sawyer. When we first meet them they are celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, both are in their 80’s. Rollback isn’t a very long book to read and its tone and state are generally quick and easy to understand and get through. As we proceed through Rollback Mr. Sawyer does a pretty good job in expressing the aged married couple.We soon learn that there is something pretty special about Sarah, Don’s beloved wife, in that she is a scientist who worked closely with SETI (The Alien Seeking Governmental Agency) and had decoded the very first message sent to Earth by aliens about 30 years ago. Questions were then asked and since the aliens are far away, the alien reply arrives 30 year later! Because Sarah is a Person of Importance, she and Don are given a chance to “Rollback” their elderly state.A wealthy industrial Billionaire, Cody McGavin, is putting up what the book states is over a billion dollars for Sarah Halifax to be Rolled Back, in other words her DNA is Scrubbed and Shined and a Rollback occurs by degrees making the person young again. In the book Sarah demands that her husband Don must be Rolled Back as well and this is agreed to by Mr. McGavin, who of course has had his own Rollback, even though it is stated that he was in his late 40’s or early 50’s when he did so. The reasoning for Mr. McGavin’s very generous offer is that he believes that Sarah can decipher the alien’s message and he further believes that he can profit from it.At any rate the rollbacks are completed on Sarah and Don and something does indeed go wrong. The procedure doesn’t work for Sarah. She continues to be old as Don gets younger and younger which is the crux of Mr. Sawyers tale. In fact the whole book is really about Don more than anything else as he grows to accept that his very loved wife (the one who the rollback was for) is going to die leaving him young and lonely! Not a bad premise. Unfortunately Mr. Sawyer does slip up a bit in my view in that I doubt highly that a billionaire would just give anyone these expensive treatments, the reasons, the deciphering of the new alien transmission just isn’t good enough reason for me to believe that the Industrialist would do so. I mean if say, Barack Obama were 99 years old and with cancer and ready for his final fling then yeah, I could see a Bill Gates stepping in and becoming a hero, but this gift from Mr. McGavin seems fanciful and he actually agrees rather quickly to do the same for Don! In about 3 minutes at the cost of a billion dollars! I just don’t think billionaires are that nice!Yet I’m surely not dismissing the work done here as Don does carry the book. He’s a good guy of that there is no doubt as Mr. Sawyer shows us the typical good guy demeanor of the Male Mammal. Don’s emotions and feelings for Sarah are pretty touching at times and luckily Mr. Sawyer doesn’t go for the syrup too often, after all this is sci-fi, which concerns the alien message. Still Rollback is set within the near future and it’s interesting to have Mr. Sawyer bring up a time and place in which I myself was old enough to remember, he mentions the 80’s through Don. Don does indeed have an affair with a young colleague of Sarah’s, Leonore who is in her 20’s… I won’t divulge too much more. This is pretty lite reading though and isn’t going to keep you up all night, but I felt that Mr. Sawyer has a pretty good touch with these characters, although I felt that the depth of the piece was not what it should be.Decisions made to quickly litter the book a bit too much. Rollback is a brief novel a little over 300 pages and somewhat fanciful. I can see some people feeling pretty good about this book but I doubt that many will consider it a lasting testament to the cannon of Science Fiction.This Book Review first Appeared in By The Book, February 10, 2009.
This book was a fun, easy read. Nominally sci-fi, it reads more like mainstream fiction. True, there are aliens, but they are 18.8 light years away. This book is about ethics. SETI finally recieved a radio message from the stars in 2009. Sarah was integral to decoding that message then, at age 49, and sending Earth's reply. Now in 2047, we've finally received a reply that nobody can figure out. Sarah, unfortunately, is in her late 80's now and knocking on death's door. But a super-rich SETI-lover wants to give her more time to work on decoding the message, so he pays billions of dollars for a procedure, a "rollback," that will make her physically 25 again. She insists that if she gets a rollback her octagenarian husband of sixty years, Don, receives one too. For Don the procedure works perfectly, he's 25 again, full of vim and vigor, but for Sarah the procedure fails, she's still 88, feeble and fading. Now what?The story is told almost entirely from Don's point of view. It's about moral quandaries. There's lots of stuff in here to make you think. What would you do if you were in that situation? An easy read, but deep and thought-provoking at the same time, I definitely enjoyed this book.Sarah comes off as a much stronger more tolerant woman than I am. I would've liked to have some of the story told from her point of view. We hear what she has to say to her husband about the ethical dilemmas that arise, but what is she really thinking? There are two things that annoyed me about this book. The first was the familiarity with which the author dealt with pop topics. Maybe the author was just trying to emphasize when a section of the story was set in 2009 as opposed to being set in 2048 (lots of this story was told in flashbacks), but it seems to me that too many references to Seinfeld, Conan O'Brien, Blondie, Red Lobster and iPods is the kind of thing can date a novel and make it unreadable in the years to come when people no longer get the references. The other thing that annoyed me was the epilogue, set another twenty years in the future. It was totally unnecessary. It added nothing to and probably detracted from the story. I would much rather have had all of that left to the imagination, especially because I didn't like the way the author had it go. There is such a thing as too perfect.
Do You like book Rollback (2007)?
A sweet little confection. The book is all set up to work through the philosophical implications of a radical life-extending medical treatment so expensive that only a handful of people on earth can afford it. Thrown into the mix are marital infidelity, the death of a longtime partner, and an alien radio transmission that amounts to a survey on species ethics.This is a fun read, though the treatment of these topics turns out to be a bit shallow. Sawyer has lots of good and interesting ideas, but everybody's so *nice* here, and the conflicts are wrapped up a little too neatly.
—Jack
¿Qué puedo decir de Sawyer... que no se haya dicho ya?Es un autor que consigue atraparte. Capaz de "facilitar" la comprensión de las partes más complicadas de la ciencia, al menos para los neófitos, o no tan neófitos (como es mi caso) que no tienen formación científica y se les puede escapar más de un concepto.Me queda claro, tras la lectura de varias de sus novelas, que el fuerte de Sawyer es la repercusión moral de los hechos. Siempre envuelve sus novelas con ese componente. De hecho, es una de las razones por lo que leo sus escritos. Me gusta que el lector se vea en la tesitura de plantearse cómo se comportaría el mismo en caso de pasar por esa situación.Sawyer es uno de los primeros autores que consiguió que la CIFI se convirtiera en uno de mis géneros favoritos, sobre todo porque se apoya más en la rama del árbol que soporta la especulación, ese «¿qué pasaría si...?» y consigue que le siga hasta el final para saber a dónde puede llevar todo lo que el plantea. Bueno, o al menos a una de las muchas posibilidades.Vuelta atrás no es una novela "rápida". Si pretendes encontrar acción a raudales te equivocas de autor. Excepto en Starplex, al menos de las que he leído, es poca la acción que puedes encontrar en las novelas de Sawyer. Como ya he dicho antes: su "fuerte" es conseguir que te cuestiones a ti mismo en las situaciones descritas.
—Oscar_LRB
First, what I liked:The book had an interesting premise: it's about both first contact and aging (or the lack thereof - almost like time travel). Some of the concepts the explored about extra-terrestials were quite novel, blowing away some of the widely-held beliefs that were put in place by the likes of Carl Sagan.However... there was a lot that I didn't care for in the book. The first was the author's idea of what things might be like 30-40 years from now. I'm not talking about "futuristic" things, like flying cars or robots; I'm talking about ideas from our present that would continue through the decades: from debatable items (like global warming) to outright fads (like Atkins, which has already been replaced by the South Beach Diet, which in turn is likely to be replaced as the diet-du-jour), the things the author believes to be enduring trends, I found to be rather unbelieveable.The second - and I might be due to the author being Canadian, and therefore more socially liberal than Americans coupled with my own religious conservatism - is that there were many liberal ideas that were presented, not just as one belief or philosophy among many, but as superior to them all. One of the major plot points seems to revolve around the controverserial topic of abortion. There are entire chapters devoted to the topic of abortion - this is surprising (and the conclusions, quite frankly, frustrating!) in a book that is supposed to be about aliens and aging. But it is not just the way the abortion issue is presented while giving barely a nod to opposing viewpoints, nor is it the fact that other social issues are presented in the same way (e.g., religion as a superstition that we'll eventually grow out of as a species) - that is not my only or primary objection to the book. It is the way these ideas and their "debate" are presented that I find most heavy-handed and offensive: these views (and the token counterpoints) are done by the protagonists who essentially agree with each other and whose views are later supported (even validated) by others. There's a definite lack of a sincere attempt to present the issues with full disclosure, and therefore without a fully comprehensive "answer" or conclusion.For example, "every child has a right to be wanted" is presented as the ideal viewpoint in the abortion issue, without acknowledging that a right to life might be superior (not to mention foundational) to merely being wanted.As I said before, what I perceive as shortcomings of this book may be due to my personal conservatism vs. the author's liberalism, but this is *my* review after all, and this was *my* reaction to the ideas presented in this book.
—Jamie
