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Average rating3.9
The compelling story of a couple living in the wake of a personal tragedy. She is a star employee of an online dating company, while he is a physicist, performing experiments that, if ever successful, may have unintended consequences, altering the nature of their lives and perhaps of reality itself. Rebecca Wright has gotten her life back, finding her way out of 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. However, she has a persistent, strange 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; and each night she has disquieting dreams that may or may not be related to her husband Philip's pet project. Philip's decade-long dedication to the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you do 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 imagines . . .
A woman deals with a strange and persistent sense of everything being slightly off, which may or may not be related to her scientist husband's pet project, a "causality violation device" that might actually be working.
Rebecca still works at the Internet dating site where she met her scientist husband, Philip. She's dealing with grief and depression following a personal tragedy, was well as a strange and persistent sense of everything being slightly off-kilter. The president seems to be the wrong person; her dreams are full of disquiet. Is this in any way related to Philip's pet project, a causality violation device (he prefers you not call it a "time machine") that might actually be working?
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Flabby early but manages to justify its unique take on time travel and earn it's ending. 3.5 but I'll round up.
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.
