Recursion by Blake Crouch

Blake Crouch is a master of churning out the kind of speculative fiction that actually makes you … well … speculate. The last one I read (Upgrade) was about a man genetically altered by his mad scientist mom. This one reminded me of Dark Matter, which I watched on Apple TV a few months ago, and it had very much the same feel: a scientist working on a cure for Alzheimer’s discovers that the machine she’s working on to access lost memories can actually send people back in time to relive those memories again, and thus change the present (or their future, if you will).

I know! Weird, right‽ The idea is something that I’ve read about before: a school of thinking that posits time is not linear; we only perceive it that way because our fragile three-dimensional thinking would be unable to cope with the reality of everything, everywhere, happening in the same instant. Imagine knowing that you were born, lived , and died (along with the entire universe) at exactly the same moment. And in that case moving to a different point in time “linear” time is as simple as crossing the street.

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The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves & China Miéville

And so Unute endures across time, his existence leaving scorch marks throughout human history, his lifespan only occasionally interrupted by the appearance of a homicidal immortal pig. …

The Book of Elsewhere
The Book of Elsewhere

A simple tale of a man (or a demi-god) who has roamed the planet for eighteen thousand years. His ultimate purpose is unknowable. He dies and is then reborn, sometimes where he fell, other times he is reborn … elsewhere.

We join Unute (or B as he’s sometimes called) early in the 21st century, working for a clandestine special forces unit where is talent for superhuman mayhem and invulnerability are put to the right use by the right side – who are less concerned than they should be that Unute often kills members of his own team during his occasional berserker rages.

And so Unute endures across time, his existence leaving scorch marks throughout human history, his lifespan only occasionally interrupted by the appearance of a homicidal immortal pig. …

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