Bittersweet and Poignant

Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's nice to see a story with a happy, functional family -- a loving couple who've been happily married for decades, with children who've done well in life and bright-eyed grandchildren to spoil rotten. It seems like so many stories these days are about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional people, the more screwed up, the better.

But everything changes when a wonderful gift goes terribly wrong. Many years ago, Sarah solved the puzzle of an alien message -- it was in fact an ethics questionnaire for a thousand people to fill out, covering a wide range of topics about how intelligent beings ought to treat one another and their environment. Now the aliens have sent a new message -- but it's encrypted, and nobody can figure out how to translate the description of a decryption key into practice. It's hoped that Sarah can repeat her previous feat -- but she's now elderly and things aren't as easy as they once were for her.

But technology can fix that -- a rollback, a treatment that resets everything to about twenty-five years old. Yes, it's incredibly expensive, but SETI's biggest patron is a multi-billionaire for whom the cost is pocket change. Sarah accepts, but only under the condition that her husband Don also receive a rollback.

Except Sarah's doesn't work. It's thought that an experimental cancer treatment she took to beat breast cancer may have made fundamental changes in her biochemistry or microbiome that prevent the rollback from working on her. So now Don's biologically a young man while his wife remains elderly and in failing health.

Given that the central focus of the aliens' communication is ethics, it's not surprising that a lot of Don's story is his own struggles with impulses contrary to his own moral compass. I'm not entirely comfortable with how his relationship with one character was resolved -- it felt too much like he got the reward after failing the test -- but then I think of Andrew Greeley's novels, and how he so often wrote about flawed characters failing, then finding their way back to redemption, and how many of them still get to have happy endings.

The ending is happy, in a bittersweet way that's almost impossible to discuss without spoilers. I'd love to see another novel dealing with what comes next, but I could also live with the novel as it stands.

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