It's been quite some time since I last read a book by Sawyer that I could call "great." To be generous, Rollback is just passable. The real premise of the book is a rejuvenation procedure in the style of the fountain of youth, but without the romantic fantastic notions that drove Ponce de Leon's pursuits. Say you're an 80-something; Rejuvenex bring your body back to what it was in your early 20s at the cost of about 10 billion Canadian dollars. Sawyer's strengths have been in discussing the societal implications of advances in science and I expected a lot from this book, but it fell short for several reasons.
First, the larger context of the plot is a tale of first contact with an alien race. A scientist who's at the end of her life, after being the one to decode the first message received by SETI paraphernalia, is offered a rollback so that she can work on decoding a second message. She refuses to be rolled back without her husband of 60 years, so they both get the procedure to be funded by a generous, wealthy benefactor. Good premise, nothing against that. What bothered me more than just a little was the fact that the SETI scenario is used as a backdrop. So, we have two huge issues in science and one of them is put on the back burner after being sold as the motivation factor for the story.
Second, the jacket of the book will tell you that the rollback works only for one of the spouses leaving the other one to face further physical deterioration and perhaps an imminent encounter with death. Again, a great argument, but one which was not well explored. This part of the plot reads like a very cheap romance in spite of some effort to make you empathize with the characters.
Third, Sawyer seems well settled into the habit of throwing little distracting elements in his books that don't really mean much to the story. He is getting to use his science fiction as a soapbox to discuss his points of view on any number of issues in a way that, most often, does not really connect with the main plot or advance it in a coherent way. The random factoids or short paragraphs on something inconsequential are very distracting. I am not sure that there's a whole lot of editorial effort or talent in his most recent books.
The only reason I still read Sawyer is that I continue to hope that he'll write again something as exciting and as intellectually challenging as "Flashfoward."
