Before I get into my customary recap, I’d like to share this exchange I had with my fiancée about Blake Crouch’s Recursion:

That about sums it up. Crouch followed his incredibly trippy hit Dark Matter with Recursion, which is somehow even more trippy. For the fourth year in a row, the best book I’ve read in a year is a sci-fi novel. With winding timelines, alternate presents, shifting realities, love spanning more than a hundred years, and stakes as high as life-as-we-know-it, Recursion is the kind of mind-bending thriller that Mr. Crouch has built a career out of, and seems to get better at every time out.

Warning: mild spoilers ahead.

In Recursion, false memory syndrome (FMS) is the new plague of the modern age, and it drives its victims insane as memories of a life they couldn’t possibly have lived wash over them. NYPD Detective Barry Sutton sees it firsthand as he tries—and fails—to prevent a woman from throwing herself off a skyscraper. The woman is haunted by the sudden emergence of memories of a marriage she never had, to a man she’d never met. Guilt-ridden from his inability to save her, Barry goes out to Montauk, NY to speak to the husband-who-wasn’t and discovers that although he’s living a great life with his wife, he seems to remember this marriage, too. The man tells Barry about a hotel in New York that offers the opportunity to relive—and change—some of the most painful or regretful memories, and also informs him that they’re being watched. When Barry sneaks into this hotel, he’s abducted, and his captor forces him to recall his most painful memory—the night his teenage daughter died.

Meanwhile, neuroscientist Helena Smith is at an impasse with her research on mapping the neurons from which specific memories emerge. This research is critical to her revolutionary theory of treating and possibly halting cognitive degeneration in Alzheimer’s patients. As her grant from Stanford University is set to expire, she’s approached by billionaire tech genius Marcus Slade, who offers to completely fund her ambition. Within a year, Helena has developed the technology to the point where memories are not only mapped to specific neurons, but those neurons can be stimulated to spontaneously trigger that memory. But when Slade modifies her technology, it unleashes a power that alters the very fabric of reality around them. Separately, Barry and Helena are thrust into something far beyond their comprehension, and only together do they have a chance to fix it. Failure means the end of the world.

Recursion is an intense read that is tough to put down once you get going. Make sure you clear your schedule. Blake Crouch’s style lends to reading large chunks at a clip—I devoured it in four, 80-page sessions at an hour apiece—but so much happens within this twisting tale that it doesn’t hurt to take notes. The characters are clearly defined and relatable, and every choice they make seems reasonable in the situation. You can resonate emotionally with Barry and Helena during their various struggles, and you can even understand the motivations of the antagonist, Marcus Slade. It’s a tightly spun narrative about how power can corrupt, and how things can get out of control with even the best of intentions.

And because I have to give a negative aspect of the book, the downside is that the story is a small bit derivative. The central conceit is reminiscent of a particular 2004 movie starring Ashton Kutcher, and while Recursion does the trick better by several orders of magnitude (with higher stakes and a better-told story), it’s worth noting that if you’ve seen the aforementioned film, you’ve got a vague idea of how at least 2/3 of the story will go down. However, I happened to like that movie, so its similarities don’t bother me nearly as much.

Recursion is a beast of a sci-fi thriller that takes your mind on a rollercoaster and makes you think hard. Give yourself a day or two after you’re done to recover because this one will linger with you for a bit.

Pros: Mind-bending, compelling thriller with leads that are easy to invest in and is addictively readable.

Cons: Central plotline has been done before.

Rating: 5 of 5 stars.

#bookreview #2019 #BlakeCrouch #Recursion #scifi #timetravel