This novel about rejuvenation had a lot of psi-fi potential because the ‘Rollback’ is of age. What could be more central to human psychology than ageing? The main character, a man in his eighties, undergoes a medical procedure involving restoration of telomeres and some sci-fi hand-waving, and he goes all Benjamin Button. He reverse-ages remarkably fast, a process that stops, for reasons unknown, at twenty five. Presumably, he then ages forward again toward death. It’s a fountain of youth story. Never mind that restoring telomeres might stop ageing but wouldn’t reverse it.

Despite all that, the jacket blurbs, marketing, and first chapters present the novel as an alien first contact story. Benjamin’s wife, also in her eighties, learns that scientists have received a message from intelligent life on a distant star, for the second time. The first message was forty years ago, when she was a young researcher. She decoded the message and crafted a reply to it. The transmit and return time was 20 years each way, so only now, after 40 years, Earth is finally getting a reply.

For reasons not explained, she is the only person who can unlock the new, encrypted message. Why it is encrypted is unknown. What ‘encrypted’ even means in the context of an alien message is unexplained. Nonetheless, despite the fact that she knows nothing about cryptology, she is the only person on the planet qualified to deal with the new message. Um, okay.

The only sensible solution then is to roll back her age, so she can be 25 again, right? I mean, what other options do they have? With whining, her husband is allowed to roll back his age too. But the procedure doesn’t work for her so her husband becomes the 25-year-old main character, and she is all but forgotten, as are the aliens and their secret message, until much later in the novel.

As a young man again, what does our hero do?  Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll of course. What did you expect? Unanswered are questions such as:  Is his brain still eighty years old, or has it also been rejuvenated, and if it has been, how has that affected his amygdalas, Broca’s areas, and frontal cortex? He seems to retain all his mature mental skills and mature autobiographical memory, except for “lessons learned from youth,” which apparently were few, in his case.

This is not real sci-fi. It’s fantasy that doesn’t make much sense and it’s unimaginative speculation that doesn’t tell us anything about human psychology, aliens, ageing, SETI, or anything else.

Unfortunately, it is also badly written, full of mind-numbing chit-chat, anachronisms, implausibilities, improbabilities, and cringingly lame humor. Not everybody can be Shakespeare, so let that go. My main complaint is that the novel fails as both sci-fi and psi-fi. It’s a great psi-fi opportunity missed.

Sawyer, Robert J. (2007) Rollback. New York: Tor (317 pp.)