“JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, Dulin decides it’s the perfect time for one last a week-long bus tour of North America’s Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlier—right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. The outing, courtesy of Canterbury Trails Tours, promises the trip of a (not completely real) lifetime in a (not completely deluxe) coach. Their fellow passengers are 21st-century pilgrims, each of them on the tour for their own reasons. There’s a nun hunting for an absent God, a pregnant influencer determined to make her child too famous to be deleted, a crew of horny octogenarians living each day like it’s their last, and a professor on the run from leather-clad sociopaths who take The Matrix as scripture. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the last—a Tunnel outside of time, a zero gravity Geyser, the compound of motivational-speaking avatar—with everyone barreling toward the tour’s iconic final stop Ghost City, where unbeknownst to our travelers the answer to who is running the simulation may await.”
As I’ve read the books of Daryl Gregory, you can’t escape the notion that he has one of the most incredible imagination \s you’ll find in speculative fiction. This enables him to write deftly in many different genres, which now includes this confusing, yet quirky, weird, and funny book When We Were Real.
The idea we live in a simulation is not new (it reminded me Deep Thought from Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), but here is becomes the starting off point to this novel. Here it's been revealed that our world is a simulation, and people have had seven years to adjust to that fact. To prove it, the Simulators (who or whatever they are) have populated the world with a variety of 'Impossibles', objects which defy all normal laws of physics, such as The Frozen Tornado, the Zipper, the Hollow Flock, the Geysers of Mystery, Ghost City.
Most of the book plays out like your basic road trip story, a trope used in almost every piece genre out there. Once you get through the first chapter—where majority of the characters were introduced all at once- the book settles down and each main character (who are assigned a label, i.e. THE INFLUENCER, THE REALISTS, and THE REALISTS SON) and some of the other characters throughout the book, gets a nicely developed.
It’s a bit overlong (mostly because it’s long list of characters), but Gregory does give the reader something to ponder about philosophical views on life and death. It’s also full of Gregory’s brand of wittiness (for some reason I found his comment on a women’s period, something akin to a “40-year home loan”, laugh out loud funny). Still, like his other books, beyond the sometimes biting humor, jokes, and silliness, there are a lot of emotional elements as well.
