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Version Control: A Novel by Dexter Palmer
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Version Control: A Novel (edition 2016)

by Dexter Palmer (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
6254637,943 (3.88)42
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.… (more)
Member:ethorwitz
Title:Version Control: A Novel
Authors:Dexter Palmer (Author)
Info:Pantheon (2016), 512 pages
Collections:Your library, Currently reading, Wishlist, To read, Read but unowned, Favorites
Rating:
Tags:to-read, scifi

Work Information

Version Control by Dexter Palmer

  1. 40
    The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (KatyBee)
  2. 20
    All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai (zhejw)
  3. 10
    The Rift by Nina Allan (tetrachromat)
  4. 00
    Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (pbirch01)
    pbirch01: Both use the idea of a conversation with someone who is not there as an equivalent to AI
  5. 00
    The Unseen World by Liz Moore (pbirch01)
    pbirch01: Both use computer code (and code comments) as a way of communication not just for computers but also between humans
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» See also 42 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 45 (next | show all)
The angle it takes on time travel is a nice one, arguing that a time traveler to the past would be unable to know what history had originally been when she returned to point in time she left, because now that history would never have happened. And not only would comparing the new present time to the previous present time be impossible, but she would not even know that she had ever gone back to the past, as the historical timeline in which she went back to the past never happened after she went to the past and thus altered history. The characters come to this theory only after... well, after who know how many times it happens. And who knows what the world's history had originally been like. So that'll all give the reader's brain cells something to occupy themselves with. Plus the novel dismisses the multiverse theory - I'd like to give it kudos for that!

Other layers of dislocation are added on, taking the novel from "genre" to "literary sci-fi". This passage stuck out for me, from the point of view of "Carson", an African-American physicist - possibly an alter-ego for the author to some degree?
It was about then that Carson figured that going into a science major would involve dealing with a lot less day-to-day bullshit. The message was clear: that while the work of Corey's white students would be taken at face value, whatever Carson turned in was doomed to be read through the lens of his race. If the story was not explicitly about race, then the tale would instead be of his reluctance to speak on the one subject that, surely, must occupy all his waking thoughts.
The fact of the matter was that Carson did tend to avoid talking about race: not because he was afraid to confront certain nebulously defined truths about himself, but because he found the subject to be excruciatingly uninteresting...
A career doing science would be a way around all that.
( )
1 vote lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
A really good read! It took a while to get into it, but once I did, I couldn't put it down. I actually checked out an audio version of it as well as a print copy, so I could "read" while commuting! ( )
  jilldugaw | Jan 27, 2024 |
The only book to deal with the need to account for Earth's movement through space when traveling through time. (Sorry. I just needed to acknowledge that, because it's something that has bugged me for decades.) This is one of those books which, in addition to having an engaging plot, offers up lots of little observations about life and people which should bear remembering. (The downside of audiobooks is that it can be hard to mark those tidbits when listening while doing other things. So I don't have any examples to offer up.)
[Audiobook note: January LaVoy is a magnificent reader.] ( )
2 vote Treebeard_404 | Jan 23, 2024 |
This one was just okay... I read this book because I thought it was a science fiction book about time travel! Turns out, it is only pseudo-science fiction. Actually, it is more like contemporary fiction about a failing marriage after the couple's child dies, but one of the main characters is a scientist working on a time machine.

The set-up took forever but I kept plugging away because I was promised an epic time travel twist. But... that never really came. The ending felt rushed and was quite dissatisfying.

Also, there is a lot of profanity, alcohol and drug abuse mentioned, some sexual content, evolutionary theories referenced as fact, and disdain for religion.

If this had been advertised for what it is - that is, not science fiction - I think I would have been less disappointed. ( )
  RachelRachelRachel | Nov 21, 2023 |
The boring parts were too long and the interesting parts were too short. And I did not like the narrator. ( )
  Bebe_Ryalls | Oct 20, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 45 (next | show all)
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» Add other authors (1 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Dexter Palmerprimary authorall editionscalculated
LaVoy, JanuaryNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Szauder, DavidCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Nothing is as it should be; everything is upside down.
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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.

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