Rollback

The bare bones of the plot (taken from the back cover):
“Dr. Sarah Halifax decoded the first-ever radio transmission received from aliens. Thirty-eight years later, a second message is received — and Sarah, now 87, may hold the key to deciphering this one, too ... if she lives long enough.

A wealthy industrialist offers to pay for Sarah to have a rollback — a hugely expensive experimental rejuvenation procedure. She accepts on condition that Don, her husband of sixty years, gets a rollback, too. The process works for Don, making him physically twenty-five again. But in a tragic twist, the rollback fails for Sarah, leaving her in her eighties as the second message arrives.”

The immediate comparison, for me, for this novel was Contact (the film version, though, rather than the book). In both of those we see strong-willed female characters wanting to communicate with aliens for the betterment of life on Earth. What makes them differ, though, is that Rollback is more fundamentally about the characters, their relationships to one another, and their philosophies. If you're familiar with any of Sawyer's other work, this isn't surprising, but for someone who'd never read him before I think it would create a weird effect.

The central issue of the book is morality: how does it change not only with time, but also as we experience different stages of life? Most moral philosophers don't really take the issue of aging into account when looking at their moral systems, primarily because the ideas they discuss are meant to be ‘timeless', somehow. Sawyer, though, combines this with Erikson's theories of personality development over time - you have different wants and needs as you age, so it therefore follows that you would find different things ‘moral' as well. It's an intriguing version of situational ethics that I don't think I've encountered before.

Another interesting thing about Rollback is the relationship between the two plots; in the ‘A' plot, Sarah deals with the message from Sigma Draconis, and the answers provided on the moral quiz that they sent to humanity, while in the ‘B' plot, Don shows that the reasons behind making the decisions are sometimes as important as the decisions themselves, and the climax of the A plot only comes after Sarah reviews her reasons behind her answers, which is the kind of plot-dovetailing that Sawyer always manages to pull off so well. This was by no means my favourite Sawyer novel, but it did help illustrate why I enjoy his work as much as I do.