When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory (Saga 978-1-6680-6004-9, $29.99, 464pp, hc) April 2025.
In a career that has ranged from Dickian SF to rural horror, one scenario that seems to fascinate Daryl Gregory is bringing a small but diverse group of characters together under stress, whether survivors of gruesome horror stories (We Are All Completely Fine) or disparate members of a family gifted with psychic powers (Spoonbenders). In When We Were Real, no fewer than nineteen significant characters join a cross-country bus tour visiting ‘‘impossible’’ sites where basic laws of physics seem to be suspended – a tornado frozen and solidified like an inverted mountain, geysers that seem to suspend gravity, a flock of hollow ‘‘sheep’’ that seem to be little more than faceless blobs of fluff, a magical tunnel in which both time and space seem to disappear, a chasm called the Zipper in which gravity (again) plays bizarre tricks, a ghost city in the desert that can only be seen through special glasses. The reason such places exist, we are told, is that seven years earlier a mysterious ‘‘Announcement’’ revealed that our entire world is merely a simulation, and such sites are ‘‘glitches’’ in the programming which serve as evidence for the simulation. Who the Simulators might be is one of the mysteries that haunt these characters throughout the novel, as is the question of whether there might be even higher levels of simulation at work. But, being Daryl Gregory characters, they also have plenty of perfectly quotidian problems of their own.
While the simulation hypothesis has been a topic of serious discussion among philosophers for the past couple of decades (thanks in part to a 2003 Nick Bostrom essay), and even earlier provided fodder for SF writers like Philip K. Dick and movie franchises like The Matrix, Gregory makes the question very much his own, and – given the almost psychedelic nature of some of the ‘‘impossibles’’ – the novel reminded me not so much of those familiar antecedents as of gonzo road trips like Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or pilgrimages like The Canterbury Tales (the bus-tour company even calls itself ‘‘Canterbury Trails’’). Gregory’s characters don’t regale each other with tales in the way Chaucer’s characters do, but their own stories are gradually revealed to us in ways that lend a dense complexity to a novel that at first seems like it might turn into a rollicking screwball comedy (and indeed, at times it does, delightfully).
Part of Gregory’s challenge is to present us with a huge cross-section of characters without resorting to standard ship-of-fools stereotypes. Some will inevitably seem a bit familiar – the crusty, businesslike driver; the inexperienced tour guide in way over her head; the cynical, self-proclaimed realist and his rebellious son; a no-nonsense nurse; a quartet of octogenarians; an introverted reader; a rabbi; a teenage social media influencer; and even a pair of nuns and a honeymooning gay couple from Austria. None, however, are quite as straightforward as they at first seem, and Gregory introduces an additional thriller plotline in the form of a professor who joins the group late and is clearly being pursued not only by government agents, but by a shadowy terrorist group called the Protagonists. All this leads to some impressive action sequences late in the novel – shifting the narrative structure from episodic adventures to a fast-moving chase-and-pursuit tale featuring gunfights, a mysterious guru called the Avatar, and even a harrowing childbirth, and which ingeniously draws together aspects of those earlier ‘‘impossibles,’’ the question of how many levels of simulation might actually be at work, and the even more basic question of whether there is a base reality that might somehow be visited. It’s Gregory’s most complicated and sophisticated narrative structure to date, and while some readers might find it daunting to keep track of nearly two dozen characters and their emerging secrets and relationships (I found myself printing out for reference a convenient character chart from the book’s front matter), it’s something of a tour de force that will likely satisfy both readers familiar with Gregory’s signature inventiveness and anyone fascinated by the sort of post-Dickian reality-testing that he handles here with unusual sophistication and – more important, perhaps – with a cast of characters whose fates seem worth investing in.
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This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.
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