The Sword and Laser discussion

This book is supposed to be great on references, so I went thinking it would be chock full. Well...it was more like some fairly obvious ones. Yep, caught the reference to "the future's so bright, I gotta wear shades." And Ozymandias. Then one of them meets Socrates. Is that a reference, or a brag?

Anyhoo, watching the threads start up this month, before I'd read the book, made me free associate to Stevie Wonder singing "This is how we lose it..."

I suppose the rest is spoilery, so...
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So, the book wasn't quite what I expected. Wasn't bad though, just different. I thought it would be, say, a literary / epistolary version of the Bobiverse, with references flying fast and furious. Instead it was more like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, except neither is evil and both are as capable as Sherlock.

As for further free association...when I hear "literary SF" I think of two authors: Bradbury and Vonnegut. Bradbury was the SF author with the soul of a poet. He reveled in the vast scope of SF's potential while bringing a literary bent. He celebrated along with us.

Vonnegut was also well respected by the literati, but he seems to be more laughing at us than with us. Yes, Ice 9 and "unstuck in time" are interesting concepts. I've read a fair amount of Vonnegut. But his work included too many snide asides for me to love it.

So which would the be? Well, it is it's own work. That's to its credit. I'd put it well to the Bradbury side though. This book uses well worn SF tropes about time travel and multiversal struggles, while providing a fresh viewpoint on them.

Some of it is subtle, as when Blue grows a letter. That's straight up Garden, simply offered to the reader, no bludgeon needed.

The plot is more implied than stated. It follows the Faulkner novel structure, with some events only making sense once later sections reveal the context.

With time travel I tend to expect some things, and to the authors' credit none of the ones I expected came true. At first I thought it was just one person, and one would turn out to be a later version of the other. Nope. Then perhaps they would be the same person from different universes, alternate-universe versions of each other. Not that either. Nor an "All You Zombies" take on a time loop. The use of the Seeker was a nice touch, an unexpected turnback on previous events.

Anyhoo, this is the most unusual novel I've read in a long time. The epistolary format could have crashed and burned, but instead worked well. Nicely done. (hide spoiler)]