Dexter Palmer

Version Control, which Pantheon brought out in 2016, was Dexter Palmer's second novel. Rebecca Wright handles customer support for the dating site where she met her husband, Philip Steiner, a physicist whose decade spent on a causality violation device, a term he much prefers to time machine, has stalled his career, and Rebecca cannot shake the feeling that the world around her is subtly off. The Washington Post picked it among the year's best science fiction and fantasy, and GQ and BuzzFeed both put it on their lists. Palmer took his doctorate in English at Princeton, writing on Joyce, Gaddis and Pynchon, and organised what was billed as the first academic conference on video games at an Ivy League school. His debut, The Dream of Perpetual Motion, recast The Tempest in a steampunk register; Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen works from the Surrey affair of 1726 in which a woman persuaded a string of physicians that she was giving birth to rabbits.