Version Control

It's a bit overstuffed, going on a lot of tangents about technology, e.g. social media, online dating, deepfakes/AI. It's all very insightful, but it does distract from the core of the story.

For Fans Of: Dark Matter, The Fold, All Our Wrong Todays

Alright, look. I went into this really going by the tags on goodreads as:
‘Science Fiction'
FIction
Time Travel
SF Fantasy

I'm not saying that those tags are WRONG but shit man. This is ‘literature' about relationships and cultural perspectives.
So I'm really torn on how i feel about it. It's difficult when you go into a book thinking about what it SHOULD be and then reading the book and it not being that thing at all. Does that make the book bad? Not at all. If it deviates from the storyline now and again to provide in-depth backstory and history of the relationships of the pre-sent-day characters, does that make it boring? this book just ‘lingers'.

It all starts out with the main character ‘Rebecca' feeling that something's not right. people are right, things start to glitch. There's reports of people suffering from this psychosis disorder of suffering from too much technology that causing these feelings. Now this is the part that really sparked my curiosity and I wish that was explored more.
Then away we go through a number of digressions:

Rebecca's backstory of dating and ‘dancing' (a reference to a Dane Cook bit)
Philip's backstory
Their son ‘Sean'
The Causality Violation Device
Rebecca's Job
Rebecca's father the minister
The security guards in the lab
The lab assistant Alicia
the other lab assistant Carson
Rebecca's friend Katherine and Carson
Then we learn about ‘the tragedy'

I did enjoy the futuristic setting and the touches of society covered in the writing. There are autonomous vehicles. An overbearing ‘VR' president that could interrupt your dinner or even your phone calls, and a dating service that's engineered to have a lower success rate than what's possible to keep people coming back. and that can also monitor the modulations in the voice of the call center agents grading their ‘performance' while helping customers.

It's all very insightful sprinkled with those ‘Black Mirror' esque glimpses of how future technology can be used to deceive us.
It reads like a slow drama, there's a tiny bit of foreshadowing for interesting things on the horizon, but it's not until the final one-third of the book that things start picking up a little.

It was good, just definitely not what I had expected.

At first, I felt like this book couldn't decide whether to be a literary domestic drama or a hard science depiction of how time travel would work. By the middle of the book, the two forms melded into something original and satisfying.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's rare to find literary scifi / speculative fiction that's so subtle and careful in the building of plot. Halfway in, when the thing happens, I was almost disappointed, wishing it would have stuck to just being about those small discrepancies and the general feeling of unease. But, obviously, the 2nd half was good too.

We're in the very near future, autonomous cars and algorithms are ever-present, a physicist works on a causality violation device and his wife has these moments of uncanny, where things just don't seem quite right. The book's title will eventually come into play and it's done very elegantly and all the geeks will be satisfied. But it's far from just a scifi book, it's also about the lives of scientists, all our realities in this age of data, about addictions and regrets and all the different versions of people we are.

Also, isn't that cover great?
4.5

Maaamma mia. MAAAAMMA MIA. I've got chills! OOOH. OH MAN, I GOT CHILLS. OHHH MANNNN.

So I had super low expectations for this book - I assumed it was going to be another disappointing mainstream sf book like American War or Underground Airlines or Dark Matter. BUT NO. About 25% of the way in, I was like, “huh. this this pretty good, these characters are really well drawn, and that's so funny and true about OKCupid”. At 40%, I was like, “hm, maybe this is pretty good, but is there any sf in this?” At 50%, I was SUDDENLY IN TEARS and getting chills from one of the most horrifying, chilling descriptions of a tragedy I've ever read. The second half of the book, when I realized the Science Fiction had occurred and WAS OCCURRING, I was riveted. And the ending! THE ENDING! MAMMA MIA. MAAAAMMA MIA.

Basically Dexter Palmer has done something that is soooooo difficult, and he did it - MWAH - with pizzazz! I doff my hat to him. I bow down. WOW. He's (1) world-built an amazingly precise, biting near future America akin to a good Black Mirror episode, (2) peopled it with tangibly real people, who frustrate you and amuse you and feel like the 3D people from your daily life, and (3) structured his plot like one of those Japanese secret puzzle boxes that shimmy and wiggle to reveal hidden chambers, for a story that (4) makes smart (even new!) philosophical points about that most tired of sf topics: time travel! I was ENTHRALLED. I was AMAZED. I was like, DAMN.

Okay. So I don't want to spoil anything, because I SO admired the deftness with which Palmer told his story: it was elliptical, it was smart, and he would deliver certain scenes (that 50% tragedy, ho shittt) with such great force just by virtue of how he hints and elides them earlier. But the main story is about a couple - Rebecca and Phillip - who met on an online dating site (basically OKCupid) and got married. Rebecca is a bit shipwrecked by the Great Recession, while Phillip is a passionate, remote physicist with lots of potential. In fact, he works on a TIME TRAVEL BOX. When we meet them, they've been married for a few years, it's not a great marriage, and there was some tragedy in their past - they had a son, Shaun, and it's apparent that he died.

AND THAT IS ALL I WILL SAY ABOUT THAT.

Guh. So time travel stories always have the usual concerns about paradoxes and regret and fate. And this book certainly has that in spades. There are fun, well-cited discussions between Rebecca's Unitarian minister dad and Philip regarding this. (And omg I just realized now it's a LITERAL Schrödinger's box!! Also I am amazed at Palmer as the superset of all these characters' knowledge - yoooo SO VAST!) But, in addition to that, this book ALSO makes keen, precise observations of social media and an Internet society - he writes about the performative aspect of social media, the pervasiveness of surveillance (and the accompanying security nihilism), the churning of human beings and human relations into Big Data-fueled machine learning algorithms. Everything he says is ON POINT and very true. Again, it's akin to the best of Black Mirror. There's the President, for example, who can appear - at any moment - on all screens, where he individually greets us and delivers a tailored bit of news or propaganda or pep. (This only works, of course, if everyone is always facing a screen, which... well, we are.)

But in addition to these “big topics” of the multiverse and big data eroding our lives and the replacement of eye contact and in-person chat with text mediated by screens - ON TOP OF ALL THAT - Palmer ALSO makes precise points about the sociology of academia and the scientific community (YO THIS FELT SO REAL), and the subtle pervasiveness of racism and sexism, and alcoholism! He does this all effortlessly, it feels like, and it feels natural and human and vulnerable. This is a long-ish book (~500 pages), and I alternatingly felt annoyed by or protective of each of these characters - I'd feel frustrated with Rebecca's alcoholism, only to then feel incredible heart-crushing sympathy a few scenes later, only to then feel annoyed again, and then suddenly awed by her. And the same with the other characters: Philip, Alicia and Carson, Kate, everyone. You're charmed by their vulnerability, you're annoyed by their (very believable) foibles. They felt like PEOPLE. Also, this was one of those books that had me both laugh out loud AND cry, which is like bing bing bing we have a winner.

Oh yes, and one more aspect of delight: I don't think Dexter Palmer codes, but he clearly knows all about the basic ideas, even if the jargon is a bit “off”. In particular, the titular “version control” (which prior to reading, I was like, oh haha does he mean git) - well, YES, he DID MEAN GIT. And when the physicists talked about commenting their code and writing “spaghetti” code, I was like, haha is it python, and YES IT IS PYTHON. This delighted me to no end. ESPECIALLY SINCE THE FATE OF THE MULTIVERSE HANGS ON A SPAGHETTI OF GIT COMMIT HISTORY. HAHAHAHAH That was so wonderful. So gratifying. Here is my favorite tweet about such spaghettis. I already feel panic when my CODE looks like that, if my WORLDLINES looked like that, well.

OH YES, this book is also a bit like Primer (one of the best time travel movies evaaaa) and a bit like The Lathe of Heaven. SO GOOD. MUCH RECOMMEND>>>>

Smart science-fiction for people who love science.

Rebecca Wright feels like something is off, that the world is upside down. She lives in a near future New Jersey with driverless cars and an omnipresent president that happily introduces every TV show and delivers personalized messages to couples out on a date or families celebrating a birthday. Maybe it's nothing though, she's got all the hallmarks of the unreliable narrator we've grown used to in fiction. Meanwhile her husband is obsessively working on a causality violation device - which he's tired of everyone referring to as a time machine.

And there you go. All the pieces are in place and you settle in for some time travelling shenanigans. But Dexter Palmer isn't interested in telling you that story quite yet. He meanders around, poking at ideas around big data, race, relationships and more. And you as the reader can't help but wonder what sort of book you've found yourself in. You begin to feel the same sort of unease that Rebecca feels. This isn't quite right. One of the characters in the story states; “Science fiction is a fantasy in which the science always works.” Is this a clue? Where are we headed exactly?

Dexter Palmer is a wildly entertaining writer and I couldn't help but enjoy his tangents and poking around in this world. So good!

Flabby early but manages to justify its unique take on time travel and earn it's ending. 3.5 but I'll round up.

There is a particular style of science fiction I cannot get enough of. Intelligent, mind-bending, and, most importantly, cultivated in literature, these stories are a rare treat. (Too often, genre writers become so enamored with the confines of the genre that they box themselves in.) Version Control, Dexter Palmer's second novel, satiated this need of mine.

Page by page, Version Control builds upon a great opening. The tension forces the reader to stay awake despite the hour. There was so much promise in those first couple hundred pages, I could tell it was building up to something big: a brain-bender of epic proportions. You know when it's coming. You can feel it. Oh my god, here it comes. Turn the page and... it sort of fizzles. It wasn't a huge letdown, I mean, this was still good enough to be the plot of a The Twilight Zone episode, it just wasn't the sort of Twilight Zone episode you spend much time discussing at the water cooler the next morning. And so it goes...

Version Control is an absorbing tale and gives the reader much to consider. Through the actions of his characters, Palmer injects quite a bit of commentary on gender, religion, race, etc., that add some needed heft to the story, but may in gross weigh down the story a bit. But oh to write such clever little stories. I'm jealous. And I eagerly awaited the next, as well as any suggestions for similar reads.