Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2016
512 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
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 ...
"Starred Review. Far more than a standard-model time travel saga... Palmer's lengthy, complex, highly challenging second novel is more brilliant than his debut." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A novel brimming with ideas, ambition, imagination, and possibility yet one in which the characters remain richly engaging for the reader." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Palmer presents a fresh twist on the time-travel trope; his story line requires a close reading to enjoy the subtle foreshadowing and themes as the protagonists discover that it's possible the CVD is not as useless as once thought. The characters are complex and flawed but thoroughly worthy of attention. Fans of Palmer's previous book, time travel, near-future technologies, and sf will find great enjoyment here." - Library Journal
"Dexter Palmer's Version Control is a gripping page-turner, an insightful and wise look into the lives of scientists, a moving time-distortion story, and a clever satire about our current information age. I enjoyed the heck out of it." - Jeff VanderMeer, bestselling author of The Southern Reach Trilogy
"Is it a time machine? You be the judge. I'll just say it's a wise, sweet, and deeply unsettling story - a brilliant dystopian vision of some possible futures awaiting us, the children of the Information Age." - James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
"Dexter Palmer explores so many big things: race, science, philosophy, marriage, and personal histories growing together and apart and together again." - Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Sorry Please Thank You
This information about Version Control was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Bill Wadman
Dexter Palmer lives in Princeton, New Jersey. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, where he completed his dissertation on the work 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).
In addition to Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, Dexter Palmer is the author of two previous novels: Version Control, which was selected as one of the best novels of 2016 by GQ, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications, and The Dream of Perpetual Motion, which was selected as one of the best debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews.
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