"Recursion" by Blake Crouch: NPR



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Here's what you need to know about Blake Crouch.

Do you remember this type of college, in second year? The one who was always there at the bar, in the strange nights where it seemed like you could delay the last call just by talking fast enough and thinking big enough? He was the one you were listening to at 3 am, sitting on the floor, weed and cheap beer mingling in your head while he was developing a damn theory about perception, psychology, memory, reality. The one who never seemed to sleep. Who has always said the most fascinating things.

Blake Crouch was this guy.

I mean, maybe not. I do not know him. I have never met him. But he was this guy. Is this guy? That's how he does his nickels now. Being this guyHis books are again and again like a perfect synthesis of all those chemically modified nocturnal conversations that once seemed so important.

And his new book, recursion? Dude, that's a good one.

It starts like this: We are in 2018 and the New York Police detective, Barry Sutton, can not talk to a rider over a ledge. Ann Voss Peters is about to die before she dies, but just before she tells Barry that she suffers from false memory syndrome – an emerging neurological disease in which sufferers are suddenly struck by intense memories lives that they have never experienced. There are other spouses, other children, other choices made – sometimes better, sometimes worse. The memories appear in grayscale, black and white but with all the weight of real memories. For some, dissonance drives them to suicide.

We are next in 2007. The scientist Helena Smith is approached by representatives of Marcus Slade, one of the richest men in the world, who offers to fund his research on memory and care of the disease. 39; Alzheimer.

We are in 2018. Barry visits his ex-wife on the birthday of their daughter, who died from an accident at the murderous job years ago.

We are in 2007. Helena is in a helicopter to an offshore oil platform that Slade has turned into a laboratory. He tells her that they will change the world.

It's 2018. Barry has some concerns about Peters's suicide. He begins to investigate. He finds a secret hotel, an underground door …

And you think you know where that's going, right? Only you do not do it. Not even a little. Because Crouch has created a story of time travel, based on memory and death. He outlined the rules of a new reality in which people can come back and relive their lives, fully conscious, in another scenario. Where they can let themselves be and make different choices.

But there is a problem. A big and a smart with a strange modern resonance. And it's the unintended consequence of this taking that provides the hook for Recursion.

No, I will not tell you what it is. Where would be the pleasure of being in there?

I'll tell you that Crouch handles the accumulation well. He juggles between multiple narrators and chronologies with a confident economy. Most of the time he has an occasional character and tension (necessary, sometimes fascinating), rarely using flashbackery or gloomy soliloquy to watch in the rain. And even if some of his relationships have a puzzling intrigue, he has always been rare among this group of speculative fiction writers who betray big ideas in the future, in the sense that his characters, on an individual basis, become real. humans rather than robots programmed to interact.

Barry is likely damaged, even years later, by the losses he suffered. Helena reacts with a unique combination of human panic and intellectual, intellectual and scientific rigor, when she is confronted with what she has helped to create Slade. And even Slade – a character so destined to the one dimensional evil that his name is Slade, for self-love – gets a kind of weird humanity thrust on him by Crouch. It's a guy who thinks he's fine. That forces humanity to face its own limits by proposing a way to overcome them. But all the same, his name is Slade and he owns a secret laboratory of mad scientists on an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the ocean, so.

Whatever it is, Crouch? Bizarre certified midnight. Absolutely A guy who wonders what would happen if people were suddenly able to travel back in time, then he keeps his friends too late to tinker with the details, asking, Agree, but what about the janitor in this building? What about people on the street?

recursion is his answer to all these questions. His theory, fully developed on the page. It is more complete than expected. More flesh. More human. Her overflowing pulse goes beyond big ideas and has repercussions on a larger and more complex world. I mean, if you have the chance, is there a moment in your life that you would like to come back to? To try again, knowing everything you know now?

Of course you would do it. But recursion do not just ask you to consider power, he wants you to see the consequences. All. He wants you to see the damage caused by such choices. The bodies. Nightmares

And then he asks again: always, knowing what you know now … do you want?

Jason Sheehan knows things about food, video games, books and STARBLAZERS. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia cream magazine, but when no one is watching, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales of the era of radiation is his last book.

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