Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

Rebecca Wright has 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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Audiobook, Science Fiction Fantasy, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction

495 pages, Hardcover

First published February 23, 2016

About the author

Dexter Palmer lives in Princeton, New Jersey. His first novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2010, and was selected as one of the best debuts of that year by Kirkus Reviews. His second, Version Control, was published by Pantheon Books in February 2016.

He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, where he completed his dissertation on the novels of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon (and where he also staged the first academic conference ever held at an Ivy League university on the subject of video games).

Reviews

[Luca]

Storia molto originale sul viaggio nel tempo, fantascienza non estrema che ricorda il Dick di "Time out of joint" e alcune tra le riflessioni più profonde su integrità e rapporto tra mentore e studente nel mondo accademico. Ovviamente parlando di time travelling la storia si incarta un po' nei paradossi, ma tutto rimane un romanzo fresco e con personaggi ben delineati e nulla lasciato al caso.