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.
So having made sure he thoroughly understands the assignment, Crouch goes onto deliver a quantum-powered extravaganza that twist, turns, and loops back in itself with a breath-taking array of heroes and villains travelling back in time to thwart each other, and causing weird stuff to happen in the present (whole buildings appearing out of thin air because someone goes back in time and decides to become a better architect).
The tension throughout the whole book is real and never lets up, moving inexorably towards a climatic nuclear war that the heroine spends several lifetimes trying to stop.
Marvellous stuff. The characterisation suffers, I think, because there is just so much to cover; but given the scope of what Crouch has done here, he still gets away with it.
Recursion is not for those who don’t like non-linear plotting (think Inception in steroids), but if you like to work for your fiction, then this is for you.