Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Andromeda Bookshop in Birmingham was the biggest importer of US books, predominantly science fiction, into the UK. Every month, the shop posted a catalogue of the latest arrivals to subscribers. I bought a lot of books from it over the years, even when I lived in the Middle East. Replay (1987, USA) by Ken Grimwood was in every catalogue because Andromeda owner Rog Peyton loved the novel so much.

I remember liking Replay a great deal when I last read it in the late 1980s or early 1990s. But you know what they say about revisiting books decades later… Replay this time around was not actively bad, just not as good as I remembered it. Perhaps because its story takes place between 1963 and 1988, and that period is now so much further in the past it seems unconnected to the present.

The story is simple: Jeff Winston dies in 1988 at the age of 43 of a heart attack, and wakes up 25 years earlier as an 18 year old student in Atlanta. He soon realises he’s going to live his life all over again. But this time he has knowledge of the future, of the decades he lived in his previous life. He uses that knowledge to place sports bets and buy stocks and shares, building up a huge fortune, and living a life of luxury and ease… before dying of a heart-attack in 1988.

And finding himself once again back in 1963. This time he marries his college girlfriend, makes enough money to live comfortably, and… still dies of a heart attack in 1988. The third time, he embarks on a life of drugs and orgies, but then in 1972 he sees a movie in 1972, Starsea, which could only have been made by another replayer. He meets the producer, Pamela, but the two argue about their purpose, the reason they are replaying their lives. After her second film flops, Pamela goes to see Jeff and the two fall in love… and Jeff dies of a heart attack in 1988.

The next replay, they meet up, rekindle their relationship, and decide to tell the world about the years ahead. But the US government uses their information to protect and expand its interests abroad, making even more of a fuck up of its foreign policy than our current history, and ushering in World War III.

With each replay, however, Jeff and Pamela have been re-awakening later, so much so that on their fourth replay, Pamela awakes only hours before her fatal heart attack…

Replay’s premise is a powerful one – reliving your life over and over, remembering past lives – and Grimwood hits all the obvious story beats. There’s a lot he leaves out, by necessity. I didn’t find his description of the film Starsea convincing – even a decade later, was there any movie that could match 2001? –  and there were a few details here and there that were off (an American could never own an oil field in Abu Dhabi, for example). 

Replay is a fun, if a little mawkish, read. It seems more like historical fiction now, obviously, than it used to, but it’s written as if it were contemporary. It dates the book. And, the ending is, well, a little… banal. The pay-off for all those pages is a let-down.

Replay is in the original Fantasy Masterworks series (despite being science fiction, huh). It also won the World Fantasy Award. Grimwood wrote five novels in total, and was working on a sequel to Replay when he died of a heart attack at age 59. One of his earlier novels, Elise (1979), about an immortal French woman born in 1683, apparently now sells for silly money.