Replay

Rating:
Summary: Sci Fi book or New Age mumbo jumbo?
Review: I read and read and read through all of the different Lives this character "Replayed" and yes, it was interesting but I was really hoping for a Big Payoff; to find out why exactly this was occuring but We never do and I felt cheated because of this.
Instead we get some convuluted thing about appreciating what we have when we have it.
That just didnt do it for me.

Rating:
Summary: Loved this Book
Review: This book delivers. The author creates a driving story that never lags. This is the thoughtful effort filled with the elements and interactions one expects in such a time travel adventure.

Rating:
Summary: Yesterday and Yesterday and Yesterday
Review: I want to make a few comments on Ken Grimwood's concept.

"Replay" was published in 1986, so Mr. Grimwood could hardly have known the ironic twist history would lend to his scenario: Jeff Winston's repeats always ended in late 1988, on the verge of one of the biggest news years in a quarter of a century. Had Winston encountered a fellow repeater whose reruns ended a year or two later than his and who informed him that 1989 alone saw events such as the death of the Ayatolla Khomeini, the scrapping of the Berlin Wall, the mistaken "cold fusion" discovery he could be forgiven for thinking that his fellow was having him on.

If repeating like this actually happened, one wonders if the events of those years gave enough hints to an observer, like Jeff Winston, with some 175 years of experience, to posit the collapse of the iron curtain and the Soviet Union only a short time hence. There have certainly been no end of people after the fact who claimed to have known that the Soviet Union was in danger of collapse. (One example is the "Strategic Investment" newsletter boys, James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, who also warned us of a cataclysmic economic crash to take place before the end of Clinton's first and only term.)

"Replay", the "Back to the Future" films, and Jack Finney's "Time and Again" books assume a form of time travel that allows for the altering of events or, in "Replay"'s case, the creating of branching time streams. Winston and his fellow repeaters return to the original time stream at the end of the book. It's fantasy; the authors may do as they please with the idea. But were this sort of thing possible, one wonders if the presence of a time traveler with freedom of action wouldn't reintroduce an element of randomness to events and render the information in a future sports almanac or the time traveler's memory useless.

Especially as the years go on. In "Back to the Future II" Biff Tannen as a gambling mogul affects more than his hometown and the main character's life-- the U.S. Constitution feels his touch (headline: "Nixon to Seek 5th Term"). The sports world is not hermetically sealed from events in the rest of the world. Games could have different outcomes. Heck, Biff Tannen might even be tempted to buy some of the better athletic teams, further affecting scores and victories of teams and falsifying the data in his almanac.

Grimwood is on firmer logical ground in "Replay" having Winston take his 1963 Kentucky Derby and World Series winnings and invest in the big picture-- high tech stocks. (Unlike other investors he could easily avoid taking a bath in the collapse of the tech bubble of 1970.)

Later in the story, though, Grimwood had Winston and a fellow repeater attempt to alter the big picture by making their knowledge public with disastrous results. They had the sense to leave well and ill enough alone in their remaining "lives".

Robert Heinlein's "Door Into Summer" assumes an unalterable past, but the main character achieves his goals by working around earlier events. Since he could not have absolute knowledge of the past, there was still room for free will even in an apparently deterministic universe.

Rating:
Summary: An unexamined life isn't worth living
Review: Sadly, I learned of the existence of this book after reading the obituary of Ken Grimwood, who ironically died from the same cause as his protagonist in "Replay," Jeff Winston-- a sudden heart attack. I was intrigued by the story idea as noted in the obit, so I got the book. I wasn't dissapointed. This book is fabulous, and plays into thoughts of mortality and what might have been that affects all of us at some time. Grimwood has taken a subject that would normally seem outlandish, and made it plausable, a tribute to his skill as a master prose craftsman. The only other novelist that ever held my attention to this degree was Michael Crighton in some of his books. I'm normally not a big reader of fiction, but Grimwood's impeccable attention to detail paid off in a big way. I've since obtained two more of Grimwood's books, and look forward to reading them. Tragically, I read that Grimwood was planning a sequel to Replay, though it would be hard to imagine anything that could top this magnificant book. One of the best I've ever read.

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Summary: Replay: Less Paradox & More Philosophy
Review: Ken Grimwood's REPLAY seems destined to emerge as one of the sleeper/cult science fiction bestsellers of the last twenty years. Most reviewers who have lauded it admit to having given it several readings, with each one providing additional insight. I too have read it several times over the years, and my rereadings have caused me to conclude that whenever a fantasy/science fiction novel draws the reader into multiple readings, then the impetus is not just slick writing or strong characterization although good reads like REPLAY surely possess them. What distinguishes a one read from a multi-read is most often the philosophy that inheres within the novel as a subtext. In REPLAY, this metaphysical underpinning is no less than the hero's quest for meaning in an ostensibly meaningless universe.

The premise of REPLAY has been often compared to the comedy movie GROUNDHOG DAY with Bill Murray forced to relive each day with only him being able to carry accumulated memory from one day to the next. Ken Grimwood takes a similar plot device but eschews slapstick to confront the ages old quest for knowledge of self and others. Jeff Winston is your typical 43 year old successful yuppie baby boomer who dies right in the middle of a phone call. He awakens (reincarnated?) to the way he was when he was an 18 year old college freshman. What to do? What to think? Since he now knows the major events of the world for the next twenty-five years, an intriguing number of possibilities emerge. He can use his foreknowledge of sports events, economic cycles, presidential elections, and technological advances to amass a huge personal fortune. This he does but once he is the 80s version of Bill Gates and Hugh Hefner, he is still left with the unsettling feeling that his knowledge of future events excludes knowledge of the What and the Why of his replay. For the remainder of the novel, he pursues a series of leads that go nowhere. One unexpected event is that when he has relived his second life, he dies once again to be returned to the starting gate of his college freshman dorm room. His lives begin to blur into one another, and it takes several replays for him to realize that regardless of whether he led a good, bad, or indifferent replayed life, all his efforts are erased only to begin again with a clean slate. Several reviewers have objected to this recycling of present and future lives on the grounds that his continuous replaying becomes pointless and thus boring. But I think that this cyclical replaying and erasing of all footprints in the sands of time is precisely Ken Grimwood's point. If the motivation to lead one's life is missing from the more usual sources--laws, customs, rules all of which lead to clearly and unerasable consequences--then in their absence human beings must look inwardly to determine what kind of persons they wish to be. In Jeff Winston's case, he ran the gamut from hedonism to world recreators to one who is both puzzled and angry over a phenomenon that resists understanding. Each reader, Grimwood suggests, is both pushed and tugged along a moral highway that contains only the roadsigns that they choose to put up.

Rating:
Summary: Almost every best ¿What if¿¿ scenario is played out.
Review: For the person that has never read this book, the best way to describe this book is to say it's in a similar fashion as "Groundhog Day" the movie. Groundhog Day concentrated on one day that keeps repeating, and it played it for laughs. The book has several light moments, but it's written in a more serious tone.

The book is rich in trivia history. It mentions things or events that I had forgotten about. It also gave me reason to think about things that I had never thought of before and from a fresh perspective. I really feel this is the type of book that both Men and Women could enjoy.

Each replay takes on a new "What if..." and has fun exploring those scenarios. Other replays appear to take away a few options and appear to almost be guiding or teaching the characters.

The book almost takes the form of one large story that contains several short stories that are interconnected. Although some may argue that the book is a Sci Fi story, I look at it as fantasy "Lite". A story where every reader can relate to having a least one thought about "What if...", or "If I could have know then, what I know now".

At the end of the book, I pretty much felt there wasn't much else for the writer to introduce (and Ken Grimwood seemed to sense this also), and he was able to tie up all of the loose ends nicely, but I was a little sad when the book was finished.

When the reader finishes the book, it's never revealed as to way these replays occurred to the characters, but I feel the story is strong enough that it never needed to go into it (part of the fantasy).

Get the book if you can find it. It's an easy read.

(They really should reprint the book. The only way that I was able to find it was through my local library.)

Rating:
Summary: Compelling
Review: Go back and do it all again knowing the mistakes to avoid and the opportunities to take advantage of, sounds great right? Jeff Winston thinks so and uses his knowledge of future events to greatly improve on his former life. But, despite all his precautions, he dies again on the same day at the same time as before...only to awaken in his 18 year old body again. All his gains, financial and personal, erased. A blessing or a curse?

Who hasn't entertained the fantasy of reliving their life? "If I knew then what I know now...". REPLAY tells you to be careful what you wish for. Grimwood's tale is very original and thought provoking. Yes some story lines seem to go nowhere but it didn't stop me from enjoying this story nor it will it stop me from reccommending it to others.

Rating:
Summary: re: Read Replay
Review: A very satisfying time travel story. The plot revolves around people who "replay" their lives from a given point to another given point over and over again. The book was written in the 80's so some of the material seems a bit dated. I suppose the main allure to reading this book is that it makes you think. We've all thought of the question, "If we could live our life over knowing what we know now, what would we do different." This book answers that question in relation to a couple of different viewpoints. Anyone could write their own story based on this concept and each person would have a totally different story to tell. Be inspired to live each moment as if it's your last. Read "Replay."

Rating:
Summary: One Of The Very Best...
Review: As a fan of science fiction in general, and time travel stories in particular, during the past 50 years I've read perhaps 1000 SF books, and I must say that "Replay" ranks right up there near the top of the list. A must read!

Rating:
Summary: Makes me want to get out and do things
Review: I liked this book because it was thought provoking... to look at my life and ask "Is this really how I want to spend my time?".