A SECOND CHANCE FOR YESTERDAY by R.A. Sinn (Book Review)
Nev Bourne is a hotshot programmer for the latest and greatest tech invention out there: SavePoint, the brain implant that rewinds the seconds of all our most embarrassing moments. She’s been working non-stop on the next rollout, even blowing off her boyfriend, her best friend and her family to make SavePoint 2.0. But when she hits go on the test-run, she wakes up the next day only to discover it’s yesterday. She’s falling backwards in time, one day at a time.
As things spiral out of control, a long-lost friend from college reappears in her life claiming they know how to save her. Airin is charming and mysterious, and somehow knows Nev intimately well. Desperate and intrigued, Nev takes a leap of faith. A friendship born of fear slowly becomes a bond of deepest trust, and possibly love. With time running out, and the whole world of SavePoint users at stake, Nev must learn what it will take to set things right, and what it will cost.
Time disruption stories vary in their mechanisms for time travel. Some use machines such as Dr Who’s TARDIS, or the eponymous The Time Tunnel. Audrey Niffeneberger’s Henry in The Time Traveller’s Wife was afflicted with a genetic mutation. Sam leapt in Quantum Leap. Denzil Washington squeezed himself into a tiny compartment rigged up to a surveillance supercomputer that was only supposed to look at the past in Déjà vu. For Bill Nighy and son in About Time, it was simply a matter of stepping into a cupboard and clenching your fists and in The Arrival the very power of language facilitated travel into different points in time.
For R.A.Sinn in A Second Chance for Yesterday time travel is effected by a neural implant linked to a mainframe buried in the desert that is recording and calculating on a scale that must make crypto-mining look like the work of a pocket calculator. And – being linked to a computer – the key to time travel is of course the ‘code’ (a science-fiction term that seems analogous to fantasy’s recourse to magic). To be fair, I hear that there is code now that can write its own code and AI that is learning fast enough to make Dan Simmons vision of the emancipated artificial intelligence community the Core in Hyperion feel prescient. So who would bet against the power of code and coders to utterly transform the human experience. Nonetheless R.A.Sinn’s story, set in near-future 2045, is within easy reach of contemporary imagination and filled with the familiar environments of bars, cars and sterile offices.
Of course, the question with any kind of time-travel power is what do you do with that. Sinn’s vision of technological innovation, initially at least, has eschewed the traditional model of heroic individuals heading years back in time to right wrongs, solve crimes and even kill Hitler. Instead the entrepreneur behind SavePoint has invented a means for wealthy users to make micro-jumps back in time of a few seconds enabling them to effectively hit a personal ctrl-z[i]. Thus the users can obliterate any mistake, including those embarrassing social faux pas or acts of relationship destruction by skipping back to a ‘save point’ before they made that wholly unsuitable reference in front of entirely the wrong person. Who among us wouldn’t love to be able to pull some ill-chosen words back unspoken into our mouths at least ten times a day… no? just me then?! (The moment where I personally would most have appreciated access to SavePoint 1.0 lies some years in the past and also in this footnote[ii])
However, this motion of reliving small moments through SavePoint 1.0 is only the starting point of Sinn’s story. Like many technological innovations the urge is to monetise it still further with an upgrade, a SavePoint 2.0 which is where things go wrong for our protagonist the ambitious, driven and brilliant coder Nev.
Nev is an engaging character, a young, talented woman who we follow in a close third person point of view. She has escaped a religious family background and some personal tragedies to throw herself into a high-pressure career. In rare excursions from work she draws in moments of alcoholic excess or commitment-free sex (“Nev opened her eyes and scanned the bar for someone worth sleeping with”) before plunging back into the comfort of her advanced memory foam coding chair, and the lines of code that are her one true love and friend.
But events push her back into … er… events she thought she had escaped. As Nev leads the coding charge, frantically programming SavePoint 2.0 in time for the big launch, she discovers a glitch, or rather it discovers her. Instead of escaping momentary faux pas, she finds is reliving whole days of them – waking up with a hangover she has yet to do the drinking for. The progression is actually explicit in the chapter headings which are all time stamps in the format seconds,minutes,hour,day,month,year or ss.mm.hh.dd.mm.yyyy.
As Nev herself notes “This wasn’t some Groundhog Day scenario. She was losing time.” Unlike other time travel adventures where people thrown into the past at least get to travel forwards from that point, Nev is waking up each morning not in tomorrow but in yesterday – or as she starts calling it yestermorrow. She has perfect recall of “the future” that is the days of living in the past that she has already experienced, but no recollection of what happens(happened?) in the past days that she is still heading towards. This creates confusion where for example her mother rings, full of the emotions from a conversation she has ‘already’ had with past travelling Nev, but which Nev has yet to experience. More significantly when Nev does find an ally to try and address the problem of the glitch they both struggle with the fact that they are each travelling in the opposite direction along the relationship continuum of ‘cautious suspicion to comfortable familiarity.’
Sinn’s imaginative take on time travel does have its more traditional element of trying to undo a mistake – in this case the code glitch that afflicted Nev and which, if unaddressed, will afflict millions more when SavePoint 2.0 gets launched. However, while Déjà vu is one of my favourite manifestations of this kind of challenge, Sinn’s approach is a ‘next level’ web of tangled complications.
The world building delivers a credible and therefore frightening vision of life two decades away in 2045. The corporate monetisation of SavePoint 1.0 is not about the users, it’s about the data.
The real point of the technology wasn’t the benefits reaped by its users, but from them: data, loads of it, about every mistake, made at every point in time and every place on Earth, by millions of paying customers.
Like genetic screening having a use for individuals, it’s also of use to health insurance companies, and Sinn’s highlights again the issues of our contemporary data incontinence.
Nishant Batsha’s noted in a recent article that All Fiction is Climate Fiction Now[iii] , and A Second Chance for Yesterday certainly references that
Even the double paned glass couldn’t entirely keep out the racket from the encampments. Each year the number of ceegees- or climate refugees …seemed to double. …there wasn’t enough spoace to house them [and] every self-respecting start-up shielding its taxable revenues in a double Irish crypto sandwich.
As well as corporate tax evasion Sinn takes a swipe at the anti-vaxxers with a reference to “the supermeasles pandemic of 2031-2” and also observes the continuing obsession with celebrity politicians including a passing note about “The Carlson Administration” (surely not Tucker!??!).
In short Nev’s world is no future utopia, its dystopian elements are softened by technology – for those that can afford it – and, like Ready Player One the periphery around the central plot strands is filled with evidence of a dysfunctional society that can be easily imagined from our 2023 starting point.
Nev herself is an assertive, emancipated and likeable character. She deals with office “assfoolery” from her male colleagues by programming “a bot to auto-reply every meme with personalised ads for erectile-dysfunction counselling.”
The writing can feel a bit expository in places – but that is largely a consequence of the complications of plotting, and it still rattles along at a good pace with nice lines – though, in keeping with Nev’s own immersion in the world of coding, the book’s most elegant descriptions are those that capture the ineffable magic of code and computers.
The code smelled as fresh as a wheat field after the rain.
And
A pinnacle of human engineering, cascades of qubits shimmering in super-positioned splendor, calculating causality faster than reality could keep up.
As the book, and as physics tells us,
“The difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations of the world ; its orientation is merely a contingent aspect that appears when we look at things and neglect the details.”[iv]
The paradox that those equations work equally well and consistently whether time A is before or after time B, makes for a fertile soil in which to plant any number of time travelling tales. However, A Second Chance for Yesterday is an innovative and engaging story that takes the familiar timeline disruption theme in a new direction. I’ve enjoyed the books The Time Traveller’s Wife, Life after Life, The First Thirteen Lives of Harry August Mark Lawrence’s Impossible Times trilogy and Rachel’s story in Hyperion, as well as the films Sliding Doors, Fifty First Dates, About Time, Deja Vu and Groundhog Day.
However, the only narrative structure that I remember that comes close to A Second Chance for Yesterday’s is a long ago Edinburgh fringe festival play where a murder mystery opened with the traditional denouement scene, only this time the detective utterly failed to uncover the murderer and was reassured by one of the suspects “Don’t worry inspector, there will be other murders, life must go on.” Successive scenes wound back in time with each scene taking place half an hour earlier (helpfully indicated by a stage hand moving the hands on a stage clock) until we arrived at the moment of the murder and discovered that actually they’d all poisoned the victim’s drink!
A Second Chance for Yesterday blends both the challenge of solving a puzzle in reverse and the need for character development as Nev discovers not only is she changing but she can (indeed already has) tortured the person she was(will be?) earlier in the book.
It’s a satisfying read that I stayed up late, rushing through the last few pages to finish the story before sleep claimed me, and the story and its themes lingered in my mind the morning after which is always a good sign. The ending of Déjà vu, was most strongly in my mind and, while the story delivers a complete character arc, R.A. Sinn has left some tangled threads and unanswered questions that could be picked up in a subsequent instalment. I, for one, would like to see more of Nev.
[i] I didn’t realise how often I used Ctrl-z to ‘undo last action’ until first the z key and then the ctrl key broke on my keyboard – exhausted with overuse.
[ii] A long time ago as a teacher still relatively new to a school I was duped by some fast talking sixth formers into being the ‘teacher participant’ in their entry to the end of term charity lip-synching music concert. So I was sitting in the ‘green room’ in a blond wig, a black cocktail dress and balloon falsies waiting to deliver a cringeworthy impersonation of Kylie Minogue doing The Locomotion. Fortunately, this was pre-GOP drag tirades and no, the ridiculous attire was not the cause of my regret. At the time there was only one other student in the green room, a girl who must have joined the school that year, and she looked across at me in my costume and said, quite out of the blue, “I like your boobs.” Now I processed this and searched for a response, intending to convey the sense that much as I appreciated the compliment, professionalism prevented me from entering into further conversation on the matter. What actually came out of my mouth was “I’m sorry I can’t say the same.” And there was no way back from that, silence descended, until the rest of the troupe arrived and that moment of throwing a rock at some poor girl’s body self-image could never be undone. So yeah, that one is pre-eminent amongst the many times where I might have invoked a Savepoint 1.0 finger-click for a five second rewind.
[iii] Why All Fiction is Climate Fiction Now: When Art Intersects with Unavoidable Reality Nishant Batsha 7th June 2022 https://lithub.com/why-all-fiction-is-climate-fiction-now/
[iv] Of course, thermodynamics tells us that it is rising entropy, the increasing in disorder of particles and energy, that indicates the direction of time’s arrow, hence Hyperion’s anti-entropic fields around the Time Tombs.