In Conversation: Dexter Palmer and Felix Gilman

Wednesday 24 February, 2016
7pm, $0/Rsvp

The Center for Fiction
17 East 47 Street

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The acclaimed author of The Dream of Perpetual Motion returns with a compelling novel about the effects of science and technology on our friendships, our love lives, and our sense of self. 

Rebecca Wright has reclaimed her life, finding her way out of her grief and depression following a personal tragedy years ago. She spends her days working in customer support for the internet dating site where she first met her husband. But she has a strange, persistent sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter: she constantly feels as if she has walked into a room and forgotten what she intended to do there; on TV, the President seems to be the wrong person in the wrong place; her dreams are full of disquiet. Meanwhile, her husband's decade-long dedication to his invention, the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you not call a “time machine”) has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or can possibly imagine.

Version Control is about a possible near future, but it’s also about the way we live now. It’s about smart phones and self-driving cars and what we believe about the people we meet on the Internet. It’s about a couple, Rebecca and Philip, who have experienced a tragedy, and about how they help--and fail to help--each other through it. Emotionally powerful and stunningly visionary, Version Control will alter the way you see your future and your present.

Dexter Palmer lives in Princeton, New Jersey. His first novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010) was selected as one of the best debuts of that year by Kirkus Reviews. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, where he completed his dissertation on the novels of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon (and where he also staged the first academic conference ever held at an Ivy League university on the subject of video games).

Felix Gilman is the author of five novels: Thunderer, Gears of the City, The Half-Made World, The Rise of Ransom City and most recently The Revolutions. Born in London, he now lives in New York with his wife, two children, a cat, and heaps of books everywhere.

 

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