Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer
An event occurs in the year 2048 that the whole world has long been anticipating. Alien entities from the star Sigma Draconis finally reply to Earth's message from 2009, which was itself a response to the first unexpected Draconis broadcast. At the center of this new development are two elderly and typically infirm people in their late 80s: husband and wife Don and Sarah Halifax.
Sarah was the expert who decoded the original transmission, and now humanity is counting on her to do so again—for the aliens have inexplicably switched to a new cipher, as if they have something to hide from general consumption.
But Sarah is approaching the end of her mental and physical life, and she feels herself to be not quite up to the task. That's why billionaire Cody McGavin, long a SETI proponent (and also a Canadian always looking to make a loony off alien info), offers her an expensive "rollback," or full mind-body rejuvenation. Sarah consents, but only if Don gets one, too.
And that's where tragedy strikes. Don's treatment takes, but Sarah's doesn't.
Now Don is 25 years old again, with a young man's impulses, and Sarah remains an old woman. Their domestic travails are complicated by the presence of a young female grad student with whom Don falls in love. But although he vacillates between the two women in his life, Don ultimately helps Sarah to achieve her final intellectual triumph—and thereby ushers in a new age for humanity.
Soap opera, science and philosophy
Only because Robert Sawyer makes a big deal of the Jodie Foster movie Contact(1997) within his novel (to its credit, this is not an SF book that pretends SF doesn't exist), I'll be emboldened to appraise Rollback in cinematic terms.
If you concocted a composite script based on Contact, Cocoon (1985) and On Golden Pond (1981), used CGI to fill the roles with dead Hollywood icons like Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn and possibly even filmed it in black-and-white, you'd come up with something very much like the experience of reading Rollback. It's determinedly old-fashioned and heart-tugging in a Simakian way (but without Clifford Simak's harder edges and Taoist epiphanies), always striding a razor's edge between sentiment and mawkishness without ever quite falling off. The book was originally serialized in Analog in 2006-7, but would have been right at home in those pages anywhere circa 1940-1960.
Given that both main themes here—alien contact via info-bursts and rejuvenation—have experienced some major postmodern workouts in such milestone books as John Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977), Rudy Rucker's Ware Tetralogy (1987-2000), Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire (1996), David Marusek's Counting Heads (2005) and Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End (2006), Sawyer would have had to go some to amp them up. Instead, he performs a "rollback" of his own and approaches these themes as if no one had ever touched them before, setting out basic arguments and speculations that Murray Leinster might have found au courant.
It makes for a book particularly welcoming to the non-SF reader, and I can see this novel having wide appeal outside the genre. Its characterizations are strong (although Sarah gets slighted somewhat in favor of Don's randy doings), its plotting deft, its resolution satisfying (particularly the Heinlein-flavored epilogue set in 2067—anyone for The Star Beast (1954) these days?) and its message richly humanistic. But for any dyed-in-the-wool consumer of the previous books in this lineage, the ride is awfully familiar.
- by Paul Di Filippo for SciFi Weekly
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