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mentat_stem
I just found a review for this, dated 6/11/2016, I'd written in a notebook:
At one point after the halfway mark of Dexter Palmer's novel Version Control, we're given the backstory of a secondary character, Carson. In most of the book, he's an assisting physicist, a boyfriend, a molecular gastronomy geek, a foil slicing through racial stereotypes. However, we learn that he entered college with a strong desire to write science fiction, only to be shot down by a creative writing professor more enamored with the literary navel-gazing of his classmates.
Palmer gives that battle between literary and genre fiction a knowing wink and then proceeds to write both a spectacularly angsty literary character study and a heady near-future science fiction story simultaneously. The literary part feels more sfnal than it should as the relationships and drama involve physicists and big data algorithms and self-driving cars. The science fictional elements drive the narrative and the narrative structure and the internal logic of the characters.
At its core, Version Control is a simple time-travel story. As the name suggests, we experience different iterations, but where things get delightful is how the rules governing the SFnal elements are explored via metaphors in the more mundane aspects of the story A discussion on the economies of dating sites works as a...
And there my notes end.
At one point after the halfway mark of Dexter Palmer's novel Version Control, we're given the backstory of a secondary character, Carson. In most of the book, he's an assisting physicist, a boyfriend, a molecular gastronomy geek, a foil slicing through racial stereotypes. However, we learn that he entered college with a strong desire to write science fiction, only to be shot down by a creative writing professor more enamored with the literary navel-gazing of his classmates.
Palmer gives that battle between literary and genre fiction a knowing wink and then proceeds to write both a spectacularly angsty literary character study and a heady near-future science fiction story simultaneously. The literary part feels more sfnal than it should as the relationships and drama involve physicists and big data algorithms and self-driving cars. The science fictional elements drive the narrative and the narrative structure and the internal logic of the characters.
At its core, Version Control is a simple time-travel story. As the name suggests, we experience different iterations, but where things get delightful is how the rules governing the SFnal elements are explored via metaphors in the more mundane aspects of the story A discussion on the economies of dating sites works as a...
And there my notes end.
I just reread this after the Netflix series was announced. Death has been redefined by technology, but in many ways current issues of income inequality, religion, race and crime are amplified instead of solved. The world of Takeshi Kovacs bears more resemblance to the tropes of traditional cyberpunk than the futures we're extrapolating now. Many of the ideas wrestled with were timely in the years after the dot com bubble burst but are even more timely now. The hyper-violent, drug and sex filled narrative may be a bit over the top for some, but finding even the glimmers of good in such horrible characters is amazingly uplifting.
