In 2045, programmer Nevaeh Bourne is pressed for time. Tasked with upgrading SavePoint, a brain implant that rewinds a user’s life by five seconds, she enters the final lines of code—and wakes up the previous day. Nev’s backward life continues unabated as she races to mend the time glitches her employer’s technology has unleashed. Published under the pseudonym R.A. Sinn, A Second Chance for Yesterday is a futuristic page-turner coauthored by SOC professor and Communication Studies chair Aram Sinnreich (AS) and his sister, University of Victoria history professor Rachel Hope Cleves (RHC).
What inspired you to write this book together?
AS: We’d both taken stabs at writing fiction, but neither of us had managed to publish any, though we have a bunch of nonfiction books to our names. Early in the pandemic, Rachel said, “I have an idea for a science fiction novel. Want to write it with me?” And I said, “Hells yeah! Let’s do it.” Does that conform to your memories, Rach?
RHC: Yep. The genesis of this idea was, what if you were perpetually moving backward while everyone else was moving forward? What if cause and effect continue to operate from past to future? And how do you live your life when you’re experiencing the effects of causes you don’t know you’ve played a role in?
What was your process like?
RHC: The timeline had to work, so we did a fair bit of advance plotting. We traded back and forth with the writing, and every time we returned to the text, we would edit each other. We lost track of who wrote which word because each of us ended up having a hand in every sentence.
AS: The merging of our voices is definitely the most aesthetically satisfying part.
RHC: Part of our process was to have headshots of actors we could imagine playing the different roles so that we had a shared idea of what our characters looked like. We think Zendaya would be a great Nev.
How did you go about building such a realistic future world?
AS: We owe a lot to Emily St. John Mandel [Station Eleven] and David Mitchell [The Bone Clocks], who have written compelling near-term futuristic fiction. But Rachel and I also have a shared set of concerns and hopes for what the next couple of decades of our lives might look like, what America might look like, what the world might look like.
RHC: Part of it is Aram’s academic interests and part of it is a natural outgrowth of conversations we’ve had for a long time. And some of it probably bears the imprint of our mother, who studied for a PhD in economics right before we were born. She imparted a lot of that skepticism and—
AS: A healthy mistrust of entrenched power.
RHC: And patriarchy.
Epilogue
Do you gravitate toward a particular genre when you’re reading for pleasure?
RHC: I read almost every genre, with the exception of horror. And I rarely read thrillers. But romance, mystery . . . totally happy to read those.
AS: The real sweet spot is literary authors writing in the genre fiction modality. Colson Whitehead wrote the best zombie novel of all time [Zone One].
What was the last great book you read?
RHC: Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier was so brilliant. It’s Irish, about 50 percent dialogue, and owes a big debt to Waiting for Godot.
AS: I’m finishing the new Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto. I can’t think of any other author who brings that dual perspective of an intellectual from a hardscrabble background to the page in the same way. It’s beautiful.
Favorite bookstore?
AS: I’m a big fan of Busboys and Poets, which has a social justice orientation in its selection of books.
RHC: I love Munro’s Books in downtown Victoria, [British Columbia], which was founded by the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro and her husband. It’s now a collective owned by its employees.
Best time or place to read?
RHC: Everywhere.
AS: I like to be on the couch in my living room while my family is doing their stuff all around me. They're like, “Dad’s disappeared into the book again,” but I'm listening to them talking with their friends and playing video games and watching YouTube, and I’m on the couch with the dog between my legs—and sometimes my cockatiel’s sitting on my head—reading whatever great book I happen to be reading.
Any guilty pleasures?
RHC: I try not to be guilty about pleasure. People describe romance as a guilty pleasure, but I like it.
AS: I’m with Rachel.
Is there a book you’ve reread often?
AS: My comfort reading is P.G. Wodehouse, all the Bertie and Jeeves books. Whenever I’m really feeling low, that’s what I’ll pull off the shelf. But also Douglas Adams, Ursula LeGuin, Jane Austen . . . I know that sounds high-falutin’ and pretentious, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve read Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. They infallibly restore my confidence in our species.
RHC: I’m much less of a rereader than Aram, but I reread Anna Karenina last summer. The book is all about marriage, and reading it as a teenager, I had dated but hadn’t yet experienced marriage. I’ve been married for a long time [now], and I had such a different perspective on it.
You’re hosting a dinner party for three writers—dead or alive. Who’s on the guest list?
AS: Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Salman Rushdie.
RHC: I don’t have an answer to that. I’d want people who would be entertaining at the dinner table, but a lot of writers probably are not.
AS: A lot of great writers are terrible people.
RHC: Like Aram.
AS: Thank you! I never knew you thought I was a great writer.