Chasm City (Total Recall on Steroid)

Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Let us talk about Chasm City. For me, this was a hard read. As I mentioned before in a book club I am on Facebook the plot or the storyline reminds me of Total Recall. What Memories belong to who? It is an interesting story I have to agree. But I did find some contradictions that did not follow. I am not going to write a synopsis of the story anybody can find that on the internet. But I am interested in requiring help on trying to understand some of the inconsistencies or contradictions that I found.

For example, in the story there is a flotilla of ships, that is traveling to a specific location. I think they're about 6 ships heading towards a place called " Journey's End". These ships are carrying individuals who are in stasis. These individuals are unique when they come out of stasis their life spans will be much longer than the average human being it is hinted that these lifespans are immortal. But there is a skeleton crew of normal human beings manning and operating the ships. These people do not have any life extended ability. The concept is basically that generation ship where these individuals are solely there to give maintenance to the ships so the individual who is in stasis can arrive safely to the destination.

They are also carrying livestock and other animals in this same fashion. My question is, why? Wouldn't it be logical to carry these animals and livestock in stasis as well? The next question would be, shouldn't the crew be gifted with life extension technology as well? In the story there's one individual that was actually taken out of stasis with this ability. So I don't see a problem here. In fact, the entire story is around this individual or character in the book because of his long life and technology his memory is not that great. Other than that it is a good story, not one of the best in my opinion that Alistair Raynaud's has written but nevertheless a good story.

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