Blake Crouch is a sci-fi writer who always incorporates a lot of actual science into his stories, which succeeds in making them not only sound intelligent, but also realistic. Almost like the technology of our current world is one step away from taking us into sci-fi dystopia (which honestly, it probably is).
The last book of his that I read, Dark Matter, explores the existence of the multiverse, with the main character discovering that there are infinite other versions of our universe out there. In a similar vain, Recursion delves into the idea that multiple timelines could exist simultaneously. The theory is that our perception of experiencing time linearly is an illusion, when in fact the past, present, and future are all happening at the same time.
The book is written in a third person POV, but with a duel perspective from our two protagonists: Barry Sutton, an NYPD detective, and Helena Smith, a neuroscientist. In the year 2018, we see Barry investigating a strange new phenomenon that’s inflicting people called False Memory Syndrome, while in the year 2007, Helena is trying to invent a way to map a person’s memories and project them back to them for the purpose of helping people with Alzheimer’s. When Helena learns that her invention accidentally has the ability to send someone back in time via one of their old memories—allowing them to alter the timeline—the lives of our two protagonists collide, and we’re left with the question of what humanity would do with access to such power (hint: it’s nothing good).
“…perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.”
Blake Crouch again did a fantastic job combining the thriller and sci-fi genres in Recursion. What we’re left with is a book that’s a quick-moving page turner that’s also unsettlingly realistic. The end of the book started to get a little too introspective for my taste, but overall I truly enjoyed every minute of this story.
Rating: 4/5 ⭐️
“That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”