Dexter Palmer

writer
Novel

Version Control

I don“t know whether there’s any other book with Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data that lists the topics:
  1. Married women—Fiction.
  2. Physicists—Fiction.
  3. Quantum theory—Fiction.
The married woman is Rebecca Wright, a complex, introspective twenty-something who eventually lands a job at the online dating site Lovability; her physicist husband Philip Steiner has invented a time machine, um, excuse me, a causality violation device. I didn’t actually see any quantum physics going on, but there are multiple timelines, complex relationships, poking fun at both modern cybersocial life and modern academia, and philosophical discussions—all from my friend Marga as a gift for my 60th birthday.
He can read her face, and can tell that she agrees the opinion that he himself is too politic to speak aloud: that the papers being delivered today are not that good. They are not very interesting. They are parsimoniously doled out fingernail parings of thought, bloated into full length by badly written prose and extensive recapitulations of material with which an audience of this kind would already be familiar. They are evidence that the desire to bide one’s time in order to do good science has be sublimated to the constant drive to publish; as the saying goes, the committees that hand out funds and grand tenure cannot read, but they can count.
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  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel