Alex Lella's Blog

Cold Awakening

So now, I have read Cold Awakening, the story which William Atheling--James Blish quietly praised. I agree with him that it's not nearly as overwritten as The Face of the Enemy but it is overplotted.

It's about the countdown to the first interstelllar flight. The plan is to cryogenically freeze all of the colonist for a trip that will last five hundred years. However, three men have been given the unenviable assignment of being woken up early if something goes wrong. It's unenviable because if they are woken up, they will not go back to sleep and be forced to spend the rest of their natural lives on the ship alone. There's a lot of discussion and grim speculation about what could go wrong. Eventually, there is a suspicion of mutiny and sabotage.

As Atheling points out, the story becomes a detective story which is kind of hard to follow. I basically agree with Atheling that it's an easier read then some of the previous stories, but it also lost me after a while.