Patch Notes Daniel Nguyen Meridian Press | 2024 | 318pp
Reality has changed. Not all at once, and not in any way you can easily describe to the majority of humanity who has not yet read the notes. But if you have read them you will know that Tuesday was quietly rolled back, that one of your grandmothers contained a memory leak that has since been addressed in the backup copy, and that the critical vulnerability linking love to pain remains unresolved in this build.
★★★★★ — Stable build. No known issues.
Daniel Nguyen’s latest satire arrives formatted as a software release changelog, spanning Version 1.0.0 (the Big Bang, logged as ‘initial commit’) through to the present day’s Version 43.7.2 (‘minor stability improvements - resolved edge case in which some users experienced whimsy’). The conceit is sustained with impressive rigidity: every chapter is a version number, every event is a patch, and death is filed early under ‘end of life (EOL) - no further support available’. Nguyen writes with the clipped precision of someone who spends long hours arguing with idiots on the internet and has learned, at some cost, to keep it brief.
The novel’s formal architecture is where its real argument lives. In the hands of a lesser writer, the release notes format might read as a single extended gag - a clever premise coasting on its own strangeness. Nguyen resists this. The form accumulates weight across the book’s middle section, as the patch notes begin to describe things that have no business being patched: grief, rain, the contagious quality of laughter, bowler hats. By the time we reach Version 41.0.0, the deprecation of irony (‘performance overhead too significant, not backward compatible’), Nguyen has made his case that reality has been fundamentally broken and any attempt to fix it inevitably makes things worse.
There are minor structural weaknesses. The early chapters, covering geological time, can feel repetitive - one can only read ‘resolved issue causing mass extinction event’ so many times before the joke calcifies into something less interesting. And Nguyen’s decision to render human consciousness as a known issue (‘tracked since Version 7.2.0, no fix currently planned’) may strike some readers as the sort of glib cosmic nihilism that he has leaned too heavily on since at least 2014’s Fatal Dependency Error. Nevertheless, these quibbles did not prevent me from reading the final forty pages standing up in my kitchen at 11pm, as Nguyen’s final patch notes bring the novel to a conclusion that is devastating and profound, yet unashamedly glib.
A tour de force. Runs as intended.
About the Author
Daniel Nguyen is a software engineer and novelist based in Vancouver, Canada. Patch Notes is his fourth novel. A film adaptation starring Ryan Gosling is in production, which Nguyen has described as ‘an ambitious solution to an untested IP problem’.
Who Is This Book For?
For anyone who has ever scrolled to the bottom of a terms of service update just to see what was there.
I think it's fair to say that the world feels like it's coming to a point where the developers will decide that further patching of this mess is impractical and it's best to reinvent the company by creating an entirely new piece of software *sweat emoji* :)