I became a fan of Sawyer’s a few years ago, but this one cements him as one of my current favorites in the sci-fi genre. In Rollback, a husband and his famous scientist wife are offered the chance for gene therapy to “roll back” their aging process – to take them from age 85 to age 25. His rollback works – hers doesn’t. Sawyer does a good job of exploring the dilemmas and frustrations a man in that position would face. Fun reading.

I've enjoyed a lot of Sawyer's stuff, but this one left me cold. More a novella than a full-length novel, The Downloaded is entirely narrated in first-person interviews. There are a couple interesting technical ideas but they aren't explored in enough detail to really be compelling. All in all, a disappointing book.

Having watched the short-lived ABC television series "based on" this book, I was curious to see how Sawyer (an author I really like) actually envisioned the topic. Thankfully, all of the soap opera and cop drama aspects of the TV series disappeared and instead what we got was a short story exploring (just a bit) the science aspects, and mostly asking this question: how would people respond if they got a brief glimpse of their future?

Flashforward is a easy entertaining read. Not as good as some of Sawyer's other stuff (the Hominids trilogy is my particular favorite), but still worth a read.