Author: Blake Crouch
Genre: Science Fiction, Time Travel, Thriller
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell, 1984
Ever since I read Dark Matter, I have been looking forward to more of Blake Crouch’s work and when I learned there would be a new book releasing this year with the title “Recursion,” I was immediately intrigued and excited. Dark Matter was a fun, twisted, mind-bending time-travel/suspense story, the kind which I like. So, I was totally ready to get my mind-f**ked by this, and I was not wrong. Recursion was everything I desired from it and more. It’s been a long time a book has induced so many “what the f**k”. I guess the last one must have been “Dark Matter” ;). This was a great combination of Minority Report meets Primer.
-Warning Spoilers Ahead-
Helena Smith is a brilliant neuroscientist. While working on a project to help people suffering from Alzheimer, she invents the machine which can send the consciousness/memory of a person into the past. But this leaves people who are affected by time travel with a dead memory. As the device is used more often by different people, the timeline gets convoluted, and more people start having dead memories. It leads to a global crisis and almost brings humans to the brink of destruction. Barry Sutton, an NYPD officer who also get affected by the use of the device, helps Helena to fix the timeline.
The concept itself is not new, we have something similar in “X-Men Days of Future Past”, but the execution is quite unique. There are multiple timelines, each forking new timelines. Moreover, the final effort is to terminate all the alternate timelines and restore the original timeline. Sounds familiar? In programming, this would have been called “Recursion.”
The pace of the story is perfect to match the tension and high stakes. Blake moves the story at a fast pace alternating between different timelines at the same time keeping the plot coherent. Yet he never fails to surprise you time and again, and by the end, you are just exhausted, but in a good sense. I read some people complaining about the ending that it was stretched, but I liked it. The reason being, it let readers feel the exhaustion Helena has been feeling because she lived those 33 years six times.
Blake creates several great emotional and character moments, like when Barry saves his daughter from the accident in which she died in the original timeline and but to lose her again after 10 years, or when Helena lives the death of everyone she loves multiple times during her quest to fix the timeline.
If I want to nitpick, there were some very cliched moments, and at times it felt Blake is trying too hard to sound smart. But apart from these, there was not much to complain about. It’s not very easy to write one good time-travel story, because of the inherent paradoxes and less of consequence it brings. But so far Blake has managed to write two back to back great time-travel books. I can’t wait to see what he does next.
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