Anyone for a peek into the future?
Ben and Ahdi were varsity buddies where
strange circumstances brought them closer together. Adhi had a quantum
computing idea for his dissertation about having a computer talk to itself one
year into the future, thus being able to allow the user to see into the future,
and now that Ben has studied it, he is convinced he can market the idea. Things
start to go a little wobbly when personal feelings interfere with their project
and suddenly what was supposed to be a certainty in the future seems to be
going off into tangents. What started off as a great idea has now become a
contentious legal and potentially dangerous military issue. Is the idea worth
protecting and if so, how far will they go to do it?
A computer that allows you to see exactly
one year into the future. No thanks! I would hate to see the decisions that I
had made, as the reasons for the decisions would not be clear in the present.
You would never know what influenced the decision or what anomaly cropped up in
that year.
What was interesting was the marketing and
how people were buying into the product before it was even completed or was
working correctly. Are people so desperate to know where they will be or are
they too lazy or scared to make decisions now if they know the future is laid
out for them?
I found the style of the book, having been
written in the form of emails, transcripts, and social media postings, rather
interesting to read but also difficult to get into deeply. You only get to see
“published” words and not necessarily a person’s internal thoughts and feelings
so connecting with the characters deeper than what was laid out in
correspondence was not easy.
The ending was not that big a surprise as
you could take a guess where it was headed and I felt the discrepancies and the
changing/not changing the future was a little thin. I must admit that a lot of
the sciency stuff I did gloss over (both times I read the book even though I
tried harder the second time!)
Overall a very interesting concept, but
there was something lacking for me to be able to fully invest in it. Perhaps it
was the 2-D characters (due to the way we got to know them) or maybe it was the
fact that the story was fed to you in chunks and it felt like the bits in
between were missing.
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for an ARC
of the book.
