Lockstep

Apparently I'm on a sci-fi book binge all of a sudden. I blame birthday gifts.

Second book is Karl Schroeder's Lockstep. I love the worlbuilding, but the actual story has a lot of bits that come off as "generic young adult dystopia".

The core world idea is that there are about 70,000 starless planets between Earth and Alpha Centauri that run on a lockstep cycle. The entire population hibernates for (on some planets) thirty years, then wakes up for a month to do normal life things, then hibernates again. This allows decades for robots to harvest, manufacture, and from the humans' perspective, you go to sleep for a night and suddenly you have thirty years worth of resources to trade or spend. 

There's also the idea of stowaways or pirates or just regular people who are exploiting or not participating in the lockstep cycle - they either don't hibernate, or deliberately offset their pace. To people who don't hibernate, they're living normal lives, while locksteppers seem to age at a thirtieth (or less) of the normal rate.

That's all awesome. Fantastic ideas. Something I've never seen before, but is also a great, logical way for a huge non-lightspeed space empire to function.

The problem is when the book gets bogged down in stock-standard YA dystopia tropes, the big one being the cartoonishly evil corporate monopoly empire opposed by the pure-hearted poor folks.

But that's just a trick! The book only makes me think it's generic YA dystopia early on because the main character, Toby, has been thrown into a world he doesn't understand and everyone's trying to find a way to explain fourteen thousand years of civilization in a way that won't blow up his brain. So the story turns out to be much more interesting than I initially expected in my moments of eye-rolling.

That said, the romance subplot does feel a little shoehorned. But more importantly, I'm a little disappointed that the lockstep concept wasn't as fully explored as I would have liked. There are some ideas that are touched on but not expanded, such as the idea of differently-paced locksteps raiding each other, non-locksteps raiding locksteps, and entire civilizations growing and dying in the span of what feels like a few years to the locksteppers.

So now I'm totally thinking I'll steal the lockstep civilization idea for a D&D game. If I want to go with a fantasy setting, then it can be a difficult, restricted spell or ritual instead of tech-based. Gonna have to put some thought into this.