Replay - Das Zweite Spiel

Grimwood's 'Replay' was surprising. I started expecting a little crunchier of a scifi book. It quickly became 'obvious' that I was instead reading a 90s/early aughts "Sliding Doors"-esque 'how would my life be different if I chose x instead of y' story. If Replay had followed that formula, it still would have been a fine novel, but it continued to evolve and change as I went, continuing to surprise me. Ultimately, its an introspective, thoughtful, and reflective character study that feels like its first person without being first person...a meditation on life and meaning both individually and collectively, framed within a vaguely science fiction narrative.

DNF at 30%

This is going to be an odd comparison, but this book is, in many ways, the opposite of what Neuromancer did to the cyberpunk genre. Allow me to explain myself.

Neuromancer was a massively influential book that directly inspired some of the most memorable pieces of cyberpunk media, including The Matrix, Blade Runner, Cyberpunk 2077, and a host of anime and manga like Ghost in the Shell and Akira. What each of these works did was take some of the best parts of Neuromancer and implement them into their own stories to create a wonderful mural of complementary works that make the genre so incredible.

However, in my opinion, Replay was the rough draft of the "live your life over and make different choices" genre; not necessarily the prototype. Subsequent works that take this trope have vastly improved upon it rather than just doing something different with it.

I have read The Midnight Library, Dark Matter, Recursion, and Version Control. I have seen Big, 13 Going on 30, and 17 Again. All of these works took the premise of Replay, put a spin on it, and did it better. So this leaves Replay to feel a bit basic when visiting it for the first time in 2022. While I feel unfair comparing Replay to works that came out many years after it, but I can't help but feel a bit bored as I read through this. It was probably interesting at the time, I don't think it has held up quite as well.

Now to be completely fair, I have not even reached the halfway point, so it's entirely possible that it does in fact improve and do something interesting to shake it up. But I don't have the patience to wait and see.

Thankfully the blurb was misleading, this book isn't about a guy with a shitty life that gets a second chance and becomes rich and happy.

It's much better than that.