History as a rough draft

So this is the thing about time travel that means anyone with even the slightest bit of common sense would stay away from it. Because if you went back in time, the history that made you what you are would not have happened yet. And you would revert. You would become someone else.

Dexter Palmer, Version Control

The Time Traveler's Wife is the title of another book. In Dexter Palmer's brilliant Version Control, it is the wife who steps into the time machine made by her physicist husband. But Philip objects to the term time machine. He prefers to call it a causality violation device, and his experiments involve placing a robot inside and using instruments to try to measure movement through time. The results prove inconclusive.

The true focus of Palmer's novel is not Philip, however, but his lonely wife, Rebecca, who feels shut out of the part of his life, his lab, that occupies most of his time and attention. It is, she realizes too late, his one true love. Things really turn interesting when Rebecca, after catching her husband in bed with his lab assistant, gets drunk and, as an act of vengeance or just frustration, spends a few moments in his CVD. She is unaware that anything has changed, yet everything has changed. Readers will rush ahead eagerly to discover what will happen when she steps into it again, as we know she will eventually.

The story occurs just a few years in the future. We already have self-driving cars, but in this future such cars are commonplace, and one of them lies at the novel's turning point.   Rebecca can step into a clothing store and, thanks to cameras and computers, dresses that will fit her perfectly are ready to be shown to her on a screen by the time she reaches the counter. No changing room is necessary. The president of the United States, or at least computer simulations of the president, can pop up on screens in any home or business at any time and join in the conversation. The only people who still use Facebook live in retirement homes.

Palmer fills Version Control with fascinating ideas about the future, about time travel, about science fiction (he calls it "a fantasy in which science always works"), about history (perhaps, he suggests, this is only a rough draft) and about human relationships. At nearly 500 pages, it seems too long, but what should he have left out?