The Future is Yours reads as a modern day epistolary novel, its compelling story made up of email chains, text messages, transcripts of hearings, and a few other written pieces. Everything comes together to present a tale of time travel and the potential impact it could have on the world as we know it. I expected something interesting and foreboding, and the book delivered in that regard, but it went far beyond that into a business drama that I couldn’t stop reading. It’s a great novel with a solid presentation and I was a huge fan.

The Best Bits

A Few of My Favorite Things

The Format

I’m a sucker for epistolary novels and I can’t remember a more well done modern version than this. To tell a full story through emails and texts is quite the feat, and Frey does it well. Individualities are well drawn, even through the deeply impersonal medium of email. It felt like reading a television series, which personally was a big win in my book. It’s definitely something unique in the time travel genre, which I appreciated.

The Device Itself

There are a bajillion and one time travel stories where people go forward and backwards to change things, do things, ruin or fix the world, etc. In this story, that’s all simplified to a basic computer that can connect with a future version of itself. It feels relatively mundane until everything starts to unravel and you’re reminded that our entire society runs on written information, where viewing that ahead of time has the potential to drastically rewrite the world. There are other things that happen later on when the device evolves, but at the beginning it’s just something simple and that makes this story all the more impactful. That simplicity made it feel real and amplified the dread that comes with nefarious people discovering a pipeline to the future.

The Characters

This unique storytelling approach, coupled with a corporate setting, allowed for an interesting set of characters. The engineer who struggles with his mental health and doesn’t connect well with other people. The entrepreneur who is all talk and will do anything to make a connection and use it for all its worth. Their relationship from college to adulthood to new company to government hearing is a very rocky road, and it plays out as dramatically as you’d hope. Add in the brilliant lawyer wife who is secretly loved by the engineer, the initial investor with dubious morales, and dozens of other characters, and you get a full story brimming with detail and excitement that pays off with an epic conclusion.

One Final Note on the Audiobook

I started this one on audiobook to get into it a bit before reading and it was so well done that I couldn’t stop listening. Each character has a different voice and you gain a lot more depth from the emails and texts when read in their intended tones. I honestly enjoyed it enough that I’ll likely go back and listen to it again. Highly recommended if that’s your thing.