The Downloaded

Robert J. Sawyer

★★★★☆

A short, fast read built on the idea that while you can preserve people cryogenically, you have to actively keep their consciousness running in a virtual environment so it doesn’t dissipate before they’re thawed out. There’s not a lot of story, mostly just character studies, looking at how people with different VR experiences might react to waking up centuries after the fall of civilization. The astronauts who were supposed to be on their way to another star system basically experienced virtual heaven, while the convicted murderers served virtual prison time.

Structure

The Downloaded started as a full-cast audiobook, with the Covid-imposed constraint that [each scene feature only one actor]. (I don’t know why they did it that way instead of just mixing different recording sessions.) And it shows. It’s not a problem that each scene is an interview. That’s a time-honored narrative structure. But once you get to the middle and you find out who’s interviewing them, you start getting half-conversations with awkward “so, you’re saying ____?” to pass the information to the audience.

Maybe the voice actors sell it better than the plain text of the novel. Apparently Brendan Fraser voices Roscoe, which sounds like absolutely perfect casting. (I still haven’t seen The Whale, but I watched four seasons of Doom Patrol in which he delivers a surprisingly moving and nuanced portrayal of Cliff Steele.) I’ll have to see if the audio version is still exclusive to Audible or not.

Connections

Weirdly, I ended up reading a cluster of oddly-related books this summer: The Downloaded and When the Moon Hits Your Eye both cover character studies in an apocalypse that they can’t even mitigate. This and Interference both involve long-lost interplanetary expeditions reconnecting with Earth. And Interference and Overgrowth both involve intelligent alien plants, mimicry, and invasions with shifting alliances. Even Automatic Noodle opens with the main characters waking up long after a disaster (though it’s only months, and only a local disaster.)