Version Control by
Dexter Palmer
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
At first I was confused about what this book was about: technology, online dating, time travel, race, physics, love., death and grief. Of course, its about all these things. I think the thing that ties them together is the choice we have to choose what version of ourselves we show to others, and what we ultimately will become. I loved how this book progressed and the time travel parts were taken in a completely unique way. (My only issue was the introduction at the beginning of the book of a feeling several people had that something was off kilter but couldn't figure out what it was, which was intriguing --if it got resolved I missed it). Thought provoking, moving science fiction.
View all my reviews
Rebecca had decided to stop thinking about it.
Being is always becoming; people change and stay the same. What is true for bodies is also true for selves: even the most honest person has maany faces, none of which is false.
because she felt she had to talk about him, rather than merely dealing in silence with the nagging presence of his absence.
"I miss Sean," Rebecca said from the bed, trying not to think that the truth of the feeling she had at that moment (and it was true, it was: how could it not be?) was somehow diminished by the compulsion she felt to perform it.
The Rebecca Wright of thirty-wight, thinking back to the blackout-season Becca of her mid-twenties, would recall that the assignations of the core group were the performace of love, rather than the thing itself.
Then there's that weird moment of mutual recognition, when people who may have exchanged the dearest of confidences in the new world realize that here, in the old one, they are still strangers to each other.
You're too ambitious. Your reach is exceeding your grasp. Like there is such a thing. Only a person who had already reconciled hemself to a life of mediocrity would even say such a thing.
The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitabley faded, but that repeated recall of the ones your remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies.
This is why anyone with common sense would stay the hell away from time travel! Because history makes you what you are. And if you traveled back in time you wouldn't be you anymore. You would have a different history, and you would become someone else. Do you really want to become someone else?
The fear that Moses had of Yahweh was as much of HIs caprice as of His power--He was just as likely to force the Hebrews to wander in the wilderness as He was to rescue them from the Egyptians. In short, He was not the embodiment of good, but of chance; neither good nor evil, but inscrutable and unavoidable.
If God created humans with the ability to dictate the direction of history (by imagining future states of the universe and steering its path toward one version or another), then humanity's duty to God was to direct history toward the best of all possible worlds.
And when something grievous happened to us that we could never have seen coming, our first and worst impulse was to try to discover what unknown person had done the clear evil that started the chain of events that led to our tragedy, or to wonder whether that person was, inadvertently, ourselves.
To accept that the machines knew you better than you know yourself involved a kind of silent assent; you liked the things Big Data told you were likely to like, and you lived the people it said you were likley to love. To believe entirely in the data entailed a slight diminishment of the self, small but crucial and, perhaps, irreversible.
A version control system checks both copies for changes, and creates a new version of the program that incorporates the changes from both programmers.
If both programmers work on the same secion of code, which is highly unlikely, the version control protocol throws up a conflict flag. Then the programmers compare code, deicide whch of their revisions was best, and pick that one. It sounds chaotic, but it works well in practice.
But to find a lingering unread missive from someone no longer living, and someone whoselife had been so deeply entwined with one's own, raised the possibility that the past could never be a fully settled matter. It meant that your own past could be altered without your action or consent, that the story of yourself that you continually told back to yourself could be revised by force, making you into antoher person who you would, perhaps, prefer not to become.
But think about it thte other way. As you move through time you forget what you once were. Ax head and handle change. But you can send a message tor remind your future self of what you once were.
Science does not have an ego.
Consider the tendecy to view only positive statements in science as valuable.
"Smullin's Priciple": It is: Science fiction is a fantasy in which science always works.
This is when I began to see and not see, when my mind held two competing truths.
The matter of the frequency shift was small, in the greater scheme of things, and yet it was also immense. I knew that the frequency shift was a sign that our research was flawed. And yet I did not know about the frequency shift, because I preferred to be in a world in which I dide not know that our research was flawed, rather than one in which I did.
I could only see how to impose my own will on top of theris, to make the data sow what I wanted to be true, and not what all who looked at the results would agree was true. And I didn't even know what I wanted to be true, by that point.
or perhaps he realized that any version of reality requires two people to believe in it if it is to have a chance of becoming real.
keeping the secret of my intent to fail from myself
But later I reasoned that although it might be bad at keeping accurate time, it could serve another purpose. If the watch kept time inaccurately, but the degree of than inaccuracy was itself regular and predictable, then i could use the seconds gained or lost to measure the time elapsed since she had given me the watch. Therefore I could carry with me an empirical demonstration of the durability of her love.
To agree to a marriage is to consent to a mutual acto of transformation, to promise to ensure that the versions of yourselves that you will becomome will always remain in harmony, though you yourselves can never stay the same.
One of the hard things to deal with in life is the fact that you destroy potential information whenever you make a decision. You could even say tat's essentially what regret is: a profound problem of incomplete information.
Let us find our own paths: let us make our own attempts at fashioning this world; let us bear the sting of our own inevitable failures. To do ttherwise would be to fail Yourself. And the only thing You cannot do is fail.
"Human behavior--of individuals, of families, of nations--is predicated on accountability to to the future, but it is also predicated on the persistence of memeory.
Symphony of Secrets by Brendan Slocumb
