Monday, April 1, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Version Control by Dexter Palmer




More than a few books that I've read over the past three years have been jam packed with ideas, ambitious in their scope, with a number of characters and points of view for the reader to decipher.  Pulling off such an ambitious book is naturally incredibly hard, and I've tended to dislike or at least not love quite a few of these books, as these ambitions result in a book without much focus, lacking either the time to devote to each of these ideas/characters to make them worth including or spending too much time on these things to devote enough time to the cohesive plot blending them all together.  Rare is the book that manages to be so ambitious and to pull it off, resulting in my mind not quite comprehending all I've read upon completion.

Version Control is one of these rare books.  This is a book whose most overt central idea, the one hinted at in its first chapter and mentioned on its book jacket, doesn't come into play until about 55% of the way through the book, and even then what the book does with it is not what you would think at all.  And yet that first 55% of the book is chock full of ideas, interesting well built characters, such that you never really mind at all that the book is taking its time to get to the part which you know is going to happen.  And then when the book finally gets to its second act, it never really drops those concepts it introduced in the first part before the big moment, leading to one pretty incredible payoff.  The book isn't perfect and not everything works, but it's really damn close, and absolutely demands to be more read. 


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Rebecca Wright feels something is wrong in her world....and maybe THE world.  In a near future, which resembles our own world with its own strange quirks, Rebecca has spent the last few years trying to get over a family tragedy.  She works as a marketing/customer-service employee for an online dating service while her husband is a physicist in charge of what seems to be a dead-end research project - a causality violation device (which is NOT, despite what some would say, a "Time Machine").  Since the tragedy, she has felt more and more disconnected from her husband and disconnected from her job, as if she's just sort of there.

It just feels to her - and not just to Rebecca, but others in this world: her best friend Kate, her husband's fellow researcher Carson, her son Sean, and more - that something is off, that somehow different versions of this world, of the people in this world, of this world's history, are being played with somehow.  A feeling that will lead her to her husband's work....to look inside, and to find out what truly lies within a device meant to "violate causality," and whether it could really shift the world any more than the actions of others already being made in this world.......
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Version Control, as I hinted before the jump, is not a fast-paced book. The first half of the book alternates chapters between the stories taking place in the present and stories taking place in the past, leading up to Rebecca's current state of being, with the second half of the book happening in a more straight forward order.  But the book doesn't always stick with Rebecca's point of view, jumping instead between various characters to see how they look upon the world, and how their lives have panned out.  But here's the thing - none of these jumps is for the sake of all contributing really to a grand overarching plot, but to go into the lives of each of these characters and to instead explain their backgrounds and points of view.   This is very much a book about snapshots in people's lives, rather than some sort of adventure or collective journey, with the book in some parts (due to some characters being pretty involved scientists but not only due to this) going on long rants about the state of the world from these points of view.  I can imagine many a reader reading this book and going "when is something going to happen?" and such a reader will wind up disappointed, because this is not that type of book.

And yet the book was enrapturing to me, capturing my attention from the start, and only causing me to put it down because it sometimes got rather hard to read.  All of its ideas, whether communicated implicitly from the setting or by long diatribe, or through the experiences of the characters, feel incredibly right and believable.  These ideas include issues related to free will, of sexism (there's one 3 page letter of mansplaining that's just something else), of race and racism, of power and abuse of power in support of selfish interests and of oh so much more, with the book verging from one to the other, despite how seemingly unrelated they may be, with great aplomb and without losing its compelling nature.  The book's ideas are rather depressing by the way, so if you're looking for a book that is in any way fun, you're looking in the wrong place.  But it's always compelling, aided by a cast of characters who are fascinating in their backgrounds (and I plural that word for a reason) and their actions as the story progresses through various timelines.

I should add here that the setting of Version Control is absolutely fascinating, even more so given the fact that this book was written over the course of the Obama Presidency (the book was published in 2016, but was apparently written over a period from 08-15), with a dystopian world that feels oh so damn realistic when considering where we are now - with a president who, using surveillance technology on the web and everywhere, chimes in to give personal comments to individuals on a regular basis; with a governmental military science agency bankrolling research projects on the hopes of a random freak accident resulting in military applications; with an insurgency of "extremists" out in the Dakotas; with corporations having used their influence to eliminate safety measures (such as those on self-driving cars) and on programs like the ACA.  These setting details - and there are other aspects of this setting revealed as the book goes on that would be spoilers to discuss here -  provide great support for the ideas of this novel, even if the dystopian nature of this world is one of the few parts of this book that seem to be not as delved into as I might've liked.

Other than that minor gripe, again I'd point out as a negative that the book can sometimes feel a bit preachy due to the long diatribes that sometimes happen, and that the books's wide ambition sometimes does cast itself a bit too far, even if it all arguably fits on theme.  There's also one character whose actions, seemingly unforgivable from the POV of the reader, recur and I'm not sure they really worked, but a reread might change my opinion on these.  These are really minor gripes though, and I know I'm going to want to reread this book from start to finish when I have time.  Just a fascinating exploration on the book's central idea, that of the ability of people to control the versions of themselves they create and present to others, or the versions of various beings and histories and beyond.  I'm not explaining that idea really well in that past sentence, which is why I almost didn't put it in this review, but all I can say is that I heavily advise reading this book to try and see it for yourself. 
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