By Blake Crouch
I read this on the 17th of August, 2024, over the course of a journey to India.
Really really good. It was a bit loopy at the start, and it took me a good while to understand the concept, but once I got it (basically Sapir-Whorf, but before it was cool), everything clicked (allowing for generous suspension of disbelief). The key idea, similar to Stories of Your Life and Others, is of our perception of time being enforced by our brains, and that by altering our mind states we can effectively time travel. It’s presented more plausibly than that, but it’s still a little woo.
That’s where it gets more complex, with (as foreshadowed by the title), timelines branching recursively, enforcing a nuclear war doom loop until the protagonists can find a way to break out and return to the original timeline. It really is a packed novel, much like 11/22/63 - from two separate timelines detailing the initial discovery of the phenomenon and its effects, to the eleven years where Barry gets his daughter back, to the five or six full lifetimes the pair live out while trying to save the world.
The depiction of the chaos time travel would cause, from the initial hopes about using it for good, to the chaos and terrorism, to the several nuclear apocalypses launched in the hope of stopping the US from changing history, was fantastic and chilling. The ecofascist misanthropic viewpoint was expounded a few too many times, but it all played out realistically.
My favourite parts were the bits that seemed to come from Palm Springs, or about time - spending centuries with someone you love, but here with the twist that for almost all that time, save for a few days every thirty-three years, they won’t remember any of it.
It also had smatterings o f Edge of Tomorrow, especially the last scene, where Barry sits down across a bar from Helena, who doesn’t remember him, and tries to think of what he can say to her, with the book ending right as he says something, just like in that film.
You can tell it’s a good book - I remember the character names lol.
I also liked how the end of the world scenario played itself out. Most of the time, in almost all stories, the chilling cosmic threat is really obvious and unscary - big guy who wants to kill half the population, snake guy who wants to rule Britain. Even in the Lovecraftian corpus, or in [The Northern Caves][the_northern_caves.html], or even There Is No Antimemetics Division, where the big bad is genuinely scary, there’s nothing incomprehensible about them, nothing you have to peel back, nothing that causes a fresh horror every time you peel a layer back. Oh no, tentacles! Oh no, big idea which wants to replace all good ideas! (I do qntm a disservice, but వ (SCP-3125) was scarier in what it did than who it was)
In Recursion, the end of the world scenario was chilling because it was complicated and had several layers, AND it was terrifying. The time machine/memory device is indelible - once it has been introduced, there is no loop in which it does not exist, because of the way the memories return at the split anniversary. Combined with the recurring nuclear apocalypses once everyone remembers what happens, the sheer mental chaos as everyone’s memories build and overlap and override, the suffocating weight of recollection and foreboding - it all combined to make a genuinely scary and complicated outcome to be prevented, which made the book really gripping.
The way they fixed it was a bit deus ex machina, plus it was implausible that they hadn’t thought of already given all that time, but the payoff was worth it.
There were definitely rough edges and small plot holes (such as the implausibility of the characters having such a long time, several lifetimes, to think of stuff, but not doing so) but the overall pace and execution overshadowed them.
Overall, fantastic.