An NPR, GQ, and Buzzfeed Best Book of the YearOne of The Washington Post’s best science fiction and fantasy books of the yearThe acclaimed author of The Dream of Perpetual Motion returns with a compelling novel about the effects of science and technology on our friendships, our love lives, and our sense of self. Rebecca Wright has reclaimed her life, finding her way out of her grief and … reclaimed her life, finding her way out of her grief and depression following a personal tragedy years ago. She spends her days working in customer support for the internet dating site where she first met her husband. But she has a strange, persistent sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter: she constantly feels as if she has walked into a room and forgotten what she intended to do there; on TV, the President seems to be the wrong person in the wrong place; her dreams are full of disquiet. Meanwhile, her husband’s decade-long dedication to his invention, the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you not call a “time machine”) has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or can possibly imagine.
Version Control is about a possible near future, but it’s also about the way we live now. It’s about smart phones and self-driving cars and what we believe about the people we meet on the Internet. It’s about a couple, Rebecca and Philip, who have experienced a tragedy, and about how they help—and fail to help—each other through it. Emotionally powerful and stunningly visionary, Version Control will alter the way you see your future and your present.
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Version Control at first disappointed me because I thought it was going to be all about time travel, and it wasn’t. It’s more of a near future, rambling Jonathan Franzen-ish literary novel, with just a dash of time travel (except it wasn’t nearly as annoying/depressing as a Jonathan Franzen novel, thankfully.)
Once I came to terms with that, I started to enjoy it. The author, Dexter Palmer, is amazing at satirizing certain elements of our current daily life–like online dating, gun culture, and weirdly personal and targeted political ads (those emails you get from “Barack” with subject lines like “Just wanted to catch up, Sonja”)–by extrapolating a few decades ahead to a more extreme, absurd form. And in the end, he did have some interesting thoughts about time travel, memory, and narrative like I’d been hoping for.
Anyone else read a book lately that wasn’t what they expected, but they ended up liking anyway?
This one has a lot to say about how ideas of love and dating change over generations, and how different choices might give you a very different life… or might not.
I read this book months ago and it has stayed with me. Version Control, by Dexter Palmer, concerns time travel and how an event can not only change our lives but who we are and how we relate to others. The protagonist is an alcoholic, a woman who works for an online dating company. Her husband is a scientist who has developed a device that can move time backward if only for a few seconds. They mourn the loss of their son, killed in a traffic accident. A confrontation leads her to his lab and his time machine.
The result is unsettling. The aftermath is not only a variation of the accident, but a dreamlike world where relationships change and a more intrusive media threatens the nature of reality. Palmer’s fluid prose adds to the sense of disorientation as the reader grapples with the different “versions” of events, the characters and interactions. We question just how many times and for what reasons the time machine has played a part in changing reality.
Like facets of a diamond, we all have different versions of ourselves that manifest more or less depending on events and relationships. It’s not only our genes that define us but the world we engage and the challenges we face.
If you’re someone enjoys skilled prose and an insightful story of the possible consequences of time travel, I think you’ll enjoy Version Control.
I really enjoyed this unique take on a time travel story: not what I would have expected. And the characters really drew me in; the author has a talent for making very real, very compelling people come to life in this book. The only reason I didn’t give it a solid five is because sections of this book were dense with prose, most of it very technical. And while I could follow it, I found it took a lot of concentration to do so. And I’m not sure if that’s a plus or a minus. Regardless, highly recommended.
This was an original concept for the style and did keep me intrigued. The science in it was a little familiar to me, so it prompted some interesting conversation. I don’t think it is everyone’s cup of tea, but if you like speculative fiction or want to try it, I would recommend it.
Good twist on time travel. Would have benefited from being cut about 1/3.
It was filled with to much inconsequential stuff. It was boring
This book got a lot of buzz a while back, but I wasn’t enamored. Maybe because it’s sort of time-travel, sort of alternate universe what-if plot that I’ve found just doesn’t work very well for me. I didn’t care for Blake Crouch’s “Darrk Matter” either, and a lot of people raved about that one as well.
Your mileage may vary.