Recursion – Blake Crouch

Rating: 3 stars

Short version: This is about the best rating I could give to this type of thriller, which is good but doesn’t look to ask any deeper questions despite appearing to do so. Also it’s a confusion of about four different stories.

Long version: I made the same mistake again of reading the back of the book. If a book doesn’t have a summary of what happens on it in the back, for the love of god, don’t read it. All the reviews were by other authors, which is nice, but oy vey. They say a lot of nice things that I don’t entirely agree with, but one talked about how the author is the modern Philip K. Dick. Big mistake! Because Dick is one of my favorite authors. The book has a part that seems like it’s basically a copy of Flow My Tears The Policeman Said (which, props, is in my top 5 books), but other than that… not so much. Dick was great at ideas and awful at execution, and for an author that is decent on ideas and pretty good with execution… why do people feel the need to say these phrases? Whatever.

The book is pretty busy, and, though I get why the author did it, I don’t agree with the decision. Let’s talk about that.

The first plot is a mystery, and it doesn’t get far. A mysterious suicide and investigation. It’s actually because of a mysterious illness where people remember lives of other people or something. It kinda comes up throughout the story but only superficially.

The second plot is more thriller, where a mysterious tech billionaire finances some research, but things get more sinister. I do enjoy this part that, ultimately, it’s an insult to tech billionaires by calling them washed up losers who will do anything to get affirmation that they’re worthwhile. I don’t know how intentional it is, but I feel like it’s at least a little bit intentional.

The third plot is time travel. Much more on this later because it’s basically the last two thirds of the book.

The fourth plot is the end of the world. It seems like these last two are the same thing because the story is kinda how time travel leads to the end of the world, but they’re actually two different plots. But they’re all kinda related. Plot 1 initiates plot 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, so they’re connected. For a 300-page book, it seems all a bit crowded. I want to say here that it’s done about as well as it could be done. I think it’s just a bad idea to do it in the first place.

Okay, so the time travel. It turns out that when somebody dies, through some mumbo jumbo, they can travel back in time. Someone could say it’s not mumbo jumbo, but it totally is. It’s basically explained away as ‘time is an illusion’. It gets a little more complicated that, but it’s fundamentally an incorrect interpretation of a truism. The book even points out that it’s a joke like that, but it reassures us it’s more than that… but it isn’t. I mean, it’s impossible for it to be more than that, otherwise the author would have invented time travel. The book just pretends it’s based on science. Kinda? But just don’t talk about the science of it that is impossible to know?

Let me explain as far as I understand. Nobody knows how humans experience time (or why it’s unequal, such as ‘it felt like an hour in the waiting room but I was only in there for five minutes’), but we have to take it as an axiom that time flows in one direction because we have objective truth. I can say “I’m visiting you at 1 PM”, and you’ll know that I’m coming at 1 PM.

Ahead spoilers for the first hundred pages:

The book kinda plays on objective truth because each time someone time travels, it just changes the truth for everyone. However, it’s still objective because everyone still knows the truth. Just whatever humanity has done changes. If someone is a jerk, they’re still a jerk

Just to be on the safe side, I’m including this in the spoilered part. The book talks a lot about how human memories control reality, but it doesn’t dwell on it much. Every time people have to relive their lives because someone else went back in time, there isn’t much thinking done about that, except the first hundred pages. It’s not a big deal, but the emphasis is always on the time traveler (besides everyone else getting a bloody nose), almost never the real, emotional impact on everyone else.

Last thing I want to touch on is how this book is much more religious than it intends to be. It is a basic tenant of Judeo-Christian religion is that humans are fundamentally different from animals. We have sentience and are the masters of them (it’s in the bible, near the beginning of Genesis). It’s why only humans go to heaven, that we are qualitatively different.

The book affirms that it’s not just a matter of faith. There is a qualitative, objective difference (that science has failed to find because it’s only found quantitative differences between us and every other species), that our memories allow us to transcend a linear understanding of time (with that mumbo jumbo that pretends to be science but isn’t). But more than that, humans have an ability that completely defies everything else four in the natural world because it violates cause and effect.