This was a fun if somewhat confusing sci-fi thriller. It starts by introducing lots of different characters, and I did get a bit lost wondering who was who and how they connected up.
**SPOILERS**
So all the characters got the same flight, from France to America, on which there was some quite severe turbulence which they passed through and landed and then got on with their lives, in a slightly better way than before (thinking, well, I survived that near death experience, I should do better with my life now).
But – three months later the same flight with the same passengers comes in to land after being blown off course by severe turbulence. As far as they are concerned, they took off from France a few hours ago, even though three months have passed, and they (or duplicates of them) landed and have been living (or in some cases, dying) since then.
What the heck!
So, the government keeps them all locked up while they try to figure out what was going on, but eventually have to let them go, and all kinds of questions arise – did God do this? Which are the ‘real’ passengers? Are any of them real? Is anything real? The winning theory seemed to be the simulation hypothesis, which is that everything we consider as real, including ourselves, is actually just a simulation (ie computer programme) made by aliens, or future humans.
Then when a third iteration of the same flight of passengers appears in the sky, and the American government decide to blow it to smithereens, the book ends abruptly with the implication being that by making this decision, they have effectively ended the life of the simulation and therefore destroyed the whole world as we know it.
Yikes.
As I said at the start of the review, it was kind of fun and thought provoking (if a little confusing) and made me go and look up the simulation hypothesis, which is considered by some at least as a viable explanation of life and stuff, but I just can’t bring myself to believe it could possibly be true (in the same way I have researched the multiverse -ie lots of parallel universes theories, which seem to make sense in terms of maths and physics, but which I can’t make myself believe are actually real).
Sarah Wray Writer 