Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell

 

This is a weird little time-travel story that manages not to be particularly SF, the time-travel is just a thing, and it's mostly a way to get a distressingly lot of copies of one of the most annoying characters I've encountered in fiction in the same place and time. There are hints of post-apocalyptic shit here--New York City in 2071 is not a nice place in this novel--and I kinda gotta think Ferrell is trying to say things about identity and free will and the sorts of things you'd expect a story with the elements this one has to have as thematic inclusions. It's not super-well-written, though: The story is jumbled even by the standards of mediocre time-travel fiction, and there are a couple of weird transitions where it goes from all the multiples getting drunk in an abandoned hotel to life in the decaying metropolis and back, and the resolution is all kinda of wildly implausible. It wasn't a total waste of my evening, but I do kinda wish this novel had somehow gotten misdirected between 2013 and now.