Replay: A Novel

I've read and watched a lot of time travel stories. This one caught my eye based on the premise of getting to do over your life with all the knowledge and wisdom you've gained. How would you do things differently this time? How could you take advantage of what you know of the future? Would life be better the second time around? This has always been very thought provoking. It was great to see how someone else thought they may handle it. I very much enjoyed this book.

This book is more than just a time-travel/sci fi book. For me, it was more in the line of a philosophical book asking me to think about about how I would live my life if I had a chance to do it again, and again, and again. It is also a book that asks one to think about what the author's real message is - as a human species, are we gaining in wisdom, or staying the same? As we age, do we gain in wisdom, or is wisdom something that is not experience or age-related, but more a reflection of the kind of person we are? If you tap deeply into yourself, are you a scholar, a scientist, a spiritualist, a hedonist, an action hero, an acquisitor or a distributor, a humanist? Would your tee-shirt say So Many Books, So Little Time, or something else? I like books that make me think, and although I was a bit put off by Jeff Winston's early choices about how he would live a life again, by the end, the choices he selected made more sense as a whole. I grew to care about him as a character.

Stories exploring the myriad possibilities of time travel are nothing new, however, time travel stories that explore their direct effects on a person's core character are a rarity. That said, Ken Grimwood's "Replay" offers a story, strength and experience that has the rarity and luster of a fist-sized diamond. "Reply" begins by showing ubiquitous, 40-something everyman Jeff Winston dying of a seemingly random heart attack in October of 1988. Upon dying, Jeff instantly wakes up 25 years earlier as the 18-year-old version of himself, replete with all his memories and knowledge from the life he just left. Jeff, essentially, has the opportunity to live his life anew knowing what the future has in store for him. The possibilities, obviously, prove endless. Knowing the outcome of every major sporting event in the next 25 years, Jeff becomes a gambling phenom who is able to build a fortune unavailable to him in his previous life. Aside from providing himself with vast new riches, Jeff now has the opportunity to live his life to a different degree. This opportunity, of course, poses plenty of possibilities, all stemming from the same question: if you could do it all over again, would you? The obvious answer, and the one Jeff picks, is a resounding "No," and Grimwood brings his reader along for the ride while exploring what Jeff does differently. "Replay" works on a number of levels. Grimwood is fully aware of the obvious choices anyone would make in Jeff's shoes (i.e. would I marry the same women? Would I follow the same career path? Would I take that one big risk I always regretted not taking, etc.), and clearly touches upon those choices in appropriate measures. Where the book thrives, however, is Grimwood's exploration of the less-than-obvious choices: Would I try to save JFK? Would I try to prevent Gaddafi's rise to power? Would I try to change the world for the better? It's in these facets and more that Grimwood gives the reader a chance to sit in Jeff's mind while he wonders if his repercussions could benefit humanity or endanger it. On a wider scale, "Replay" offers the reader a chance to ponder our own individual impact on the world around us. While Jeff "replays" his life not just once, but several times over, he constantly ponders his lot in life. He often wonders why he was offered this opportunity and how he could best use it. These questions come up while he also sets out to discover if he is the only one experiencing these replays of if there are others like him. Grimwood takes these seemingly singular ideas and threads them into some of the more grandiose questions we often find ourselves asking, primarily, "Why am I here?" Along with offering his readers plenty of meaty, hypothetical bones to chew on, Grimwood also tells a damn fine story. His prose are cleanly structured but still emote a subtle, subliminal pathos that, much of the time, may better convey what the reader is feeling from Jeff's story than they could explain themselves. Grimwood does a masterful job of pacing a story that could have easily been told in 20 volumes into a hearty 300 pages. It's very rare that a book of speculative fiction can offer something for literally everybody, but Grimwood's ultimate "What if...?" story truly does contain something that is capable of evoking an emotion out of any reader. Highly recommended. Michael P. Ferrari Author, Assault on the Senses

I recently developed a fascination with the concept of time travel along the line of a person's own consciousness so I looked forward to this book. The basic premise is that a middle-aged man has a heart attack and dies in the year 1988 which is when the book was published. But he wakes up to find himself young again. He is in the year 1963 when he was 18 years old. Somehow, his consciousness has traveled back in time. He is in college but has all of his knowledge and memories from the future. He lives through that life and has the heart attack again on the very day and the very minute he had it before. He finds himself back in 1963. He seems to be living his life over and over. But he notices the times are getting shorter. On one time around, it starts in 1965 and then in the 1970's and so on so he knows it won't last forever. At first, I must admit I was disappointed. After a great first couple of pages, I started to get bogged down and bored with the seeming superficiality of the escapades of the main character, Jeff Winston. But this was a necessary part of the story. Shocked and disbelieving what has happened to him, he gets caught up in the very fact of being young again and all the feelings he had back then. He tries desperately to end up meeting and being with the woman he loved before but he doesn't say exactly the right things at their first meeting and his entire life takes a different direction. At first, I didn't identify with the character. His college experiences were very different from mine aside from being over a decade before mine. But I eventually realized that, as he lives his life over and over, his experiences are blending into a sort of universal experience. On the one hand, he longs for things that are deep and meaningful, for the truest kind of love. But, at the end of his life, no matter how wonderful a relationship was, he finds himself back in 1963 or close to it with everything he loved gone. One of the most poignant events is when he develops a serious relationship with a woman he knew the first time around but it had been a college relationship that never went anywhere that first time. On one of his "replays", it becomes one of his richest and lasting relationships. Then he dies again and finds himself back in 1963 again and this woman he loved is now a girl he has barely met and he just can't go through the motions because this girl is not yet the woman he loved. So he drifts sometimes into "replays" where he lives superficially for sex and knows it is superficial but he just cannot bring himself to love again only to have it all undone again. It just hurts too much. Then, in later replays, he does it again even knowing that it will end in pain because it's worth it. Along the way, he searches for reasons behind why he has these replays and tries to find out if he is the only one. There is another story that runs parallel with his own, a woman who also replays. Truthfully, I found her story to be even more interesting than his but I've already given away a lot of information. At times, the character is self-indulgent. At times, he is selfless. While time travel is the method of telling the story, it's really about human nature and mortality. It's Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy sung to the tune of time travel. It is definitely worth reading.

this book was awesome and was a very interesting take on quantum immortality i wish the author hadnt died before finishing his sequel!

It was a really great story and a well executed concept. The story made it absolutely worth overlooking, but it felt under-edited. There were constantly disorienting scene shifts with no transition. Just different days and events from one paragraph to the next. The chapters were also very long, many of those scene shifts would have been great opportunities to start a new chapter. There were also some other odd things throughout, random single letters out of place in a sentence, missing quotation marks. There were some conversations where it was difficult to keep track of who was speaking because of a mix of missing quotation marks, internal dialogue, and paragraphs intentionally split within a single spoken quotation. I think the story was good enough to make it worth dealing with those oddities, but I couldn't help the feeling that one more round of editing could have made it much better.

My friend and I were chatting about books and she said this was one of her favorites. She was so right, this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. You will be hooked from the first page. What an amazing writer. Give it a try, you won’t want to put it down. Can’t wait to find another book by him.

I gave "Replay" 4 out of 5 stars in comparison to other works from within the same genre, not on a absolute scale (i.e., I'm not comparing it with Hemingway or Marquez, but rather with Greg Egan, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, Heinlein, Gibson. SPOILER ALERT! "Replay" story is good, narrative technique even better. Characters are weak, tho. Author tends to wax romantic here and there, adding to much sugar where such idea was obviously bad. One thing that's a big no, in my opinion, is the continuous insertion of left leaning details for absolutely no frickin' reasons. When Salvador Allende is a honest man but Reagan is a lunatic opening the door to a de-facto "fascist dictatorship" the author is simply alienating half of the audience. Not so smart for an author, disregarding his/her political views.

I’m not even a huge reader and I burned through this book in like 3 days. Couldn’t put it down.

Great book and quick shipping

And a very good read. Finished it in three sittings. There must surely be someone thinking of the film rights.

There are many questions people ask themselves about their own lives, probably the most terrible questions we ask ourselves relate to things that we cannot change - what would you do differently if you had the chance of living again. Would you turn left or right? Just how different might your life be if you could go back with the knowledge you now possess? This book looks at that ultimate question - what if you could go back and do it all over again? Be born into a young body at a point in your life where nearly anything is possible. That is the story of Replay, as the middle-aged Jeff, stuck in a dead-end job and whose marriage is breaking apart, dies of a heart-attack and awakes as his 18 year old self. The book deals superbly with his initial confusion and then the slow realisation that it is a second chance, too that his knowledge of the future can bring him great wealth and even power. The book I have loved because it is so clearly honest even when showing the darker side to foresight, it looks at what most people would want to do: make money, travel around, not have to work, turn dreams into reality. Jeff is believable as he does not become a superhero nor does he want to run for President, he is just a normal person doing what a normal person would do. That said, the book pointedly shows through Jeff as the protagonist that it is not a mere knowledge of future events that can fulfil him in ways he previously didn't imagine, it is merely to desire to want to reach for something more. Replay serves as a moral tale as through Jeff you learn that perhaps living your life again and again would not be as easy nor as welcome as you would want. Ultimately the story has a profound ending with a statement that has stuck with me, years after having first read it and having since re-read it several times. I would have to say that this is the best book I have ever read, and though it might be an ironic comment this is the book I would choose to take to a desert island and read over and over again. It is touching, original, sad, funny but most importantly of all you believe it. I honestly cannot recommend the book enough, I sincerely hope you try it and love it as much as I do.

Time travel this way is amazing