One of the best [SciFi) books I ever read! This will definitely be in my Top 5 for 2021. The premise is absolutely brilliant. But what makes this book so damn appealing is how it is constructed, through emails, text messages, and transcripts, which not only moves the story along at a fast pace, but it brings the ideas and the characters to life in a way that I have never experienced before.

If you are a lover of this genre or are just interested in a great read, do yourself a huge favor and pick this one up ASAP. It is timely, fun, spot-on accurate in accessing how we interact and consume technology in our daily lives ( )

This was such a breath of fresh air for an epistolary sci-fi novel! It stayed light hearted and breezy, even when the fate of the world was at stake.

I loved the way the characters all operated, and how easy it was to understand their motivations. Even in the longer segments of speech, I knew exactly who was speaking. The texts and emails all felt realistic and I had so much fun with the way the tone shifted--especially throughout their emails with investors.

The plot held together throughout with just a little bit of suspension of disbelief. There was one moment that mentioned Covid that made me sigh because alas the author didn't have access to the Future, but other than that, it was easy to get sucked into this world.

Del Rey sold this to me since I liked Blake Crouch, Rob Hart, and Sylvain Neuvel, and I wasn't disappointed. This has the fast-paced, easy writing of Sylvain Neuvel; the thought-provoking question marks of Rob Hart; and the easy-to-digest yet super clever science of Blake Crouch. ( )

Told in a series of emails, texts, transcripts, and blog posts, The Future Is Yours is an interesting character study of two young men dreaming of fame, fortune, and making a difference in the world. The difficult birth of a computer that accurately shows what is going on in the world one year in the future makes compelling listening, especially when the dynamics of differing personalities, the headaches of being forced to listen to the people holding the purse strings, and the implications of the technology itself are added to the mix.

With the book's format of texts, emails, transcripts, and blog posts, I think The Future Is Yours is best listened to in audiobook format where the different voices can help keep readers focused on the story. I have a strong suspicion that, if I'd read this instead of listened to it, the endless stream of emails, etc. would have made my eyes glaze over from time to time whether I wanted them to or not.

If you're in the mood for a fast-paced character study about a rather scary possible technological breakthrough, I recommend Frey's thriller. It will make you think-- Do you really want to see into the future? ( )

Frey, Dan. The Future Is Yours. Del Rey, 2021.
Dan Frey’s The Future Is Yours is time travel tech thriller that owes a lot to Paycheck, which was first a 1953 short story by Philip K. Dick, then a 2003 movie directed by John Woo and starring Ben Affleck. In the Dick/Woo story an evil corporation develops a computer that predicts the collapse of civilization caused by our knowing too much about the future. In Frey’s novel, Ben Boyce and Adhvan Chaudry, two students at Stanford (and, yes, there is a direct allusion to Larry and Sergei), form a company to work on quantumly entangling a computer with itself a year in the future. This would allow information from the future to be transferred to the past. That future is in our own timeline and theoretically unalterable. If you read your own future obituary and kill yourself, where does causation reside? But never mind. These two guys are optimists, at least for a while. Where Frey’s novel separates itself from Paycheck is in how it handles characters and literary form. The partners are flawed friends who in their own way betray each other. Ben is a flamboyant salesman who wants to make the world a better place. His partner is a socially withdrawn genius who guiltily lusts after his partner’s wife. Both are conscious of being ethnic outsiders in the big money world of Silicon Valley. The literary form is something like an epistolary novel, which had its beginnings in the 18th century. There is no live action. Instead, we follow the story through the kinds of documents our culture now produces in abundance: emails, text messages, and meeting transcripts. It is almost as if human beings do not exist outside their digital footprints. In this novel, friends and lovers are seldom described as meeting face to face. There is an eerie realism in this. Oddly enough, the novel does not delve into our videoconferencing culture, whose temporal footprints are even more evanescent than digital text. Some readers complain about the sudden turn the novel takes in its final pages, but such plot twists are almost inevitable in time travel narratives. Geekily good. 4 stars. ( )

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Title: The Future is Yours
Series: ---------
Authors: Dan Frey
Rating: 1.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF Thriller
Pages: 226
Words: 69K

Synopsis:

From the Publisher

If you had the chance to look one year into the future, would you?

For Ben Boyce and Adhi Chaudry, the answer is unequivocally yes. And they’re betting everything that you’ll say yes, too. Welcome to The Future: a computer that connects to the internet one year from now, so you can see who you’ll be dating, where you’ll be working, even whether or not you’ll be alive in the year to come. By forming a startup to deliver this revolutionary technology to the world, Ben and Adhi have made their wildest, most impossible dream a reality. Once Silicon Valley outsiders, they’re now its hottest commodity.

The device can predict everything perfectly—from stock market spikes and sports scores to political scandals and corporate takeovers—allowing them to chase down success and fame while staying one step ahead of the competition. But the future their device foretells is not the bright one they imagined.

Ambition. Greed. Jealousy. And, perhaps, an apocalypse. The question is . . . can they stop it?

Told through emails, texts, transcripts, and blog posts, this bleeding-edge tech thriller chronicles the costs of innovation and asks how far you’d go to protect the ones you love—even from themselves.

My Thoughts:

I have seen the future. And it is narcissistic jackasses and emotionally stunted losers. This book was pushing the DNF line almost the entire time and I ended up reading it in one sitting so that I wouldn't DNF it. Why didn't I DNF it? Because I wanted to see the ending. And then I regretted that decision when I got there.

Both Ben and Adhi disgusted me to the core of my being. They adequately represented everything that I think is wrong in the world today and it was not one bit entertaining or fun to read about them. Personally, a good old fashioned apocalypse that killed them both, and millions and possibly billions like them, would be an acceptable solution to me. As characters they disgusted me that much. Not one shred of moral fibre was shown, not one tiny bit of backbone was revealed and Principles were jettisoned from the get-go. I actively disliked them the entire book. Even the ending where Adhi shows Ben a solution is so like him, he shoves all the responsibility onto Ben and it's pretty obvious from Ben's behavior in “the past” (which is the future) that we all know that the loop will continue. It was enough to make me want to use some profanity and tell them both to grow up and simply make ONE responsible decision in their entire lives.

The fact that Frey writes characters like these is reason enough for me to add him to my Authors to Avoid list. I don't want to spend time reading the words of somebody who can think this qualifies as entertainment. I'll give up fiction reading altogether before accepting something like that.

Read at your own risk.

★✬☆☆☆ ( )