If you like epistolary novels, skip this review because I do not. I don't even like reading my own emails so to have to read through 300 pages of emails, text messages, and worst of all senate hearing transcripts, actually stressed me out.

What I did love was the idea for the product the book is about- a quantum computer system that lets you read news from the future. There is a section where the characters try to find out if they can change the future or if it's set. That was an interesting idea and I would have loved to read a whole book about them experimenting with that. But transcripts from senate hearings? No thank you.

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.

I was invited to download this book based on books I had previously read. The action was fast-paced and it was a quick novel to read, but it just didn’t hold my interest. The characters and plot didn’t work for me.

I requested this because of an email I received marketing this book to fans of Blake Crouch. After reading it, I think this was an apt recommendation. This book checked a lot of boxes for me: soft sci-fi (not too technical), its written in an epistolary style of emails, articles, IM chats, etc, and it deals with time travel. Overall, I found this to be a quick read and I enjoyed the story and the characters.

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. 
----Two best friends create a computer that can predict the future. But what they can’t predict is how it will tear their friendship—and society—apart.

This was very fast packed book for me. 
It was an amazing concept. The story was great, And it really had me drawn in from the first page. 
I liked how this had some twist and turns to it, the charterers were also really believable which is a plus for me. 

Overall---- Great Book .

Big thanks to Netgalley for this advance copy! I love books that are told in a non-traditional way. I’m not a fan of reading a sentence then flipping to a footnote or endnote, but books like S. and Night Film and Attachments (and Rainbow Rowell in general) are really interesting reads because they are epistolary in nature, but also tell the story through multiple media forms. The Future is Yours is exactly same.

From Goodreads: Ben Boyce and Adhi Chaudry are outsiders struggling to find their place in Silicon Valley. But when Ben reads Adhi’s graduate dissertation about an obscure application for quantum computing, he has a vision of a revolutionary new technology: a computer that can see forward through time by communicating with its future self.

The two friends quit their jobs and team up to form a business, building a company that will deliver their groundbreaking device to consumers around the world. Rival tech giants try to steal their innovation, while government agencies attempt to bury it–but Ben and Adhi are helped by their own cutting-edge technology, staying a step ahead of the competition and responding to challenges before they arise.

As the tension mounts, Ben and Adhi’s friendship begins to fracture under the weight of ambition, jealousy, and greed. Most frightening of all, they discover the dark side of the machine they’ve created–the ways in which viewing the future sets them on a path toward unavoidable disaster of epic, apocalyptic proportions. Unless they can disrupt the technological system they’ve created, there won’t be any future at all.

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

This book was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It reminded me a Blake Crouch’s work, which is a huge compliment, because I’ve read almost all his books. The way the story is presented through the various documents is really creative and adds to the entire point of the book. This comes out in Feb 2021, and I will be recommending it to a lot of people at that point.

NOTE TO AUTHOR: The goodreads summary has Adhi’s name as Teddy….I fixed it here. And my favorite person on Twitter is mentioned, Lin-Manuel Miranda, but you have his handle as @LinManuel, but it’s really @Lin_Manuel. And there’s really a @BenBoyce on Twitter. Haha.

Fast-paced and engaging enough that I finished this book in one day; unfortunately, the story was fairly formulaic and used too many of the "friends turned business partners" tropes you often see, which made it quite predictable. An over-explainy "this is how I did it" ending didn't help its case much. It also didn't really add anything new to the discourse on the ethics of actually being able to see into the future.

The epistolary format worked well enough and the various pop culture and tech references were thankfully not awkward the way you sometimes see in this sort of novel. Overall, it may be a page-turner but won't leave much of a lasting impression. 2.5 stars.