Although Rebecca Wright has pieced her life back together after a major tragedy, she can’t shake a sense that the world around her feels off-kilter. Meanwhile, her husband’s dedication to his invention, “the causality violation device” (which he would greatly prefer you not call a time machine) has effectively stalled his career—but he may be closer to success than either of them can possibly imagine. Emotionally powerful and wickedly intelligent, Version Control is a stunningly prescient novel about the effects of science and technology on our lives, our friendships, and our sense of self that will alter the way you see the future—and the present.

Perhaps this is more an issue with genre-literary fiction in general, but wow have we at NUBClub had issues with endings. Version Control is yet another read of ours that collapses when the author tries to explain the storyworld. The core idea of the novel -- that the protagonist is visiting different timelines in which her family, work life, and friendships take very different forms based on simple choice differences -- is a good start. Palmer does a good job exploring the separation of the scientists from the outside world, the frustrations of their experimentation, and most poignantly the limits of technology, in the form of an accident from a self-driving car that seems very true to what would actually happen. But then the book has to end, and the author felt like he had to make the universe make sense, and it all falls apart. How exactly is Rebecca changing the timeline when she enters the causality violation device? Why are the only possible futures so dark for her family? If she can control causation, is there no way she can actually prevent tragedy? But wait, how does one consciously control causality in the device? It seems like she's making the universe change by altering minor moments, but it's not clear how she's doing that when she's not even conscious of what the device is in most of the timelines. It's striking in the novel, because without that major plot hole, a lot of the loose elements (the affairs that do or don't happen, the role Rebecca plays at work on the help line) all add up nicely to an exploration of the interesting twists life takes because of accidents. Still, we at NUBClub are very sensitive to badly explained storyworlds, and the rest of Version Control just wasn't strong enough to save it from a nonsensical explanation (or total lack of explanation at all) of the plot.