Paul Di Filippo Reviews A Second Chance for Yesterday by R.A. Sinn

A Second Chance for Yesterday, R.A. Sinn (Solaris 978-1786188274, hardcover, 320pp, $24.99) August 2023

This provocative, assured, compelling debut novel proves to be the work of two collaborating authors hiding very traceably behind a publisher-disclosed pseudonym. They are Rachel Hope Cleves and Aram Sinnreich, who also happen to be siblings. While SF has boasted many intrafamilial partnerships, I cannot recall a previous brother-sister duo, and I stand in awe of siblings who can blend their fictive viewpoints into one seamless authentic narrative voice such as we have here, without ever once apparently saying, “Mom always loved you best!”

This book starts out as a near-future (the year is 2045) investigation into a wild consumer product.

SavePoint’s premise was simple; its applications were infinite. A dorsolateral prefrontal cortex implant installed via the orbital cavity behind the right eye constantly tracked your vitals and coordinates in spacetime and transmitted the information back to the cloud. SavePoint was designed to serve as preventative insurance. In case of disaster, simply execute a pre-programmed, custom-designated “undo” gesture, and the quantum mainframe would restore you to your coordinates five seconds in the past.

This seems like a pretty hairy existential can of worms to confer upon the consumerist public, but Sinn sells the gimmick—hey, the ready uptake of Chat GPT makes anything look plausible—showing us how the technology works in an installed user base of many millions.

Our entry into this scenario comes from meeting Nev Bourne, our dauntless heroine: a sharply limned genius-level programmer working on the next release of SavePoint. Although her private life is a bit discombobulated, with many unresolved family and dating issues, and although she has enemies and frenemies at work, she stands on the verge of success. So one night she hits enter on the update code—

—and her whole life becomes totally deracinated. Nev has fallen into what she will soon come to refer to as “the Glitch.”

The next several chapters of the novel constitute one of those SF scenarios where the protagonist is plunged into the maddeningly inexplicable and must reason out the new parameters of existence. I’m thinking of various Keith Laumer books, such as The House in November; or Leiber’s You’re All Alone; or even more germanely, Jason Starr’s recent The Next Time I Die.

What Nev reasons out is this. She hit the switch for the new code near midnight one evening, lost consciousness, then awoke when all the objective measures of time showed it was the day before the launch. So she lives confusedly through that 24 hours of rerun time, recapitulating some events, altering others, before dropping off the map again. And when she awakes, she’s now 48 hours in the past. And after that, 72 hours, and so forth. Her consciousness has become unhinged from time, and is moving retrograde to the perceived arrow of time.

Once Nev has this sussed out, the book shifts gears to a classic “I’m in this fix, how do I get myself out?” mode. Think of the vibe of Weir’s The Martian, or the attitude of several Hal Clement stories. Nev embarks on a mission to erase the Glitch and reorient herself in time, through engineering both cybernetic and social. But the frustrating thing is, every 24 hours she has to start over again, and from deeper in the past.

Luckily for her, there are two figures who are miraculously aware of her plight. Her boss, Noel Kusuma, a New Age flake who might even have caused this to happen. And an outlaw hacker named Airin Myx. While Myx (they, them) continues to live forward in time, they and Nev nonetheless work out an ingenious system of communicating and laboring together for the same goal.

Oh, yes, there’s also Jim Bone, an incoherent streetperson whose gnomic utterances begin to resonate.

The romance that develops between Myx and Nev is indicative of the nicely divided dual priorities by which Sinn contours the book. Not only is the techno-riddle given full prominence, but so is Nev’s whole familial and adult backstory. She ends up on a path to solve not only the Glitch, but also all the little glitches in her life. The knockout ending knots off both threads nicely. It’s the same kind of inconclusive conclusion, a literal leap into the unknown, that distinguished the daringness of The Incredible Shrinking Man: we’ve come to an almost unknowable ultimate point—let’s jump further!

This trope of becoming unmoored in time has, of course, seen numerous classic iterations, from Slaughterhouse-Five to Groundhog Day (a film explicitly referenced here, if only to highlight Sinn’s more complex and distinctive rendering). I was reminded also of an overlooked classic by Robert Silverberg: “(Now + n, Now – n)”. It’s a very potent novum, and Sinn extrapolates it brilliantly. The mixed irritable/applauding reactions of Nev to the doings of her past selves become a humorous motif.

At one point, Kusuma gives a trippy little speech:

“But words like that mean nothing to you and me. We are no longer fettered by the evolutionary mechanism that constrains us within an artificially linear temporality. It’s nothing more than a vestigial artifact, as useless as the webbing between our toes, or faith in gods. Time is not directional. 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.”

Nev nods along, but ultimately rejects this mystical worldview in favor of hard-nosed engineering strategies. As with so much classic SF, that’s the glory of this suspenseful, fast-moving tale: the ratiocinative human mind pitted against the existential whirlpool of the cosmos, even when moving ass-backwards through time!

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