Version Control

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!