Recursion (Crouch novel)

Recursion

First edition cover
Author	Blake Crouch
Cover artist	Christopher Brand
Language	English
Genres	Science fiction Thriller
Publisher	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date	June 11, 2019
Publication place	United States
Media type	Hardback
Pages	326
ISBN	978-1-5247-5978-0

Recursion is a thriller science fiction novel by American writer Blake Crouch, first published in the United States in June 2019 by the Crown Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. The novel explores themes of memory, identity, and time.

Plot

In 2018, NYPD detective Barry Sutton encounters a woman afflicted by False Memory Syndrome (FMS), a condition causing memories of lives never lived. After he fails to prevent her suicide, Barry investigates FMS, leading him to a strange Hotel Memory, operated by business magnate Marcus Slade. Slade captures Barry and interrogates him about his greatest regret. Intent on proving the value of his technology and buying Barry's cooperation, Slade forcibly sends Barry back to the night his daughter Meghan died in a hit-and-run accident 11 years prior. Barry saves Meghan, altering the course of their lives.

Ripple effects caused by the clients of Hotel Memory begin to appear as the date of the original present approaches. Inconsistencies are initially limited to clients' immediate social networks, but when New York's skyline changes, FMS symptoms erupt on a mass scale. On the anniversary of Barry's memoryjump, Barry's family regains their memories of a timeline where Meghan died. Overwhelmed by the influx of false memories and uncertain what is real, Meghan commits suicide.

In 2007, Helena Smith, a neuroscientist focused on Alzheimer's research, works on a "memory chair" designed to replay past experiences. When her research grants run dry, venture capitalist Marcus Slade offers her funding to continue her research on a remote oil rig. Slade guides Helena towards building a deprivation tank intended for time travel through death and resurrection. He reveals that in the original timeline he was Helena's lab assistant, and they unknowingly caused research subjects to time travel when recalling memories. When Slade realized this, he sent himself back in time to become a billionaire. Realizing she is a captive on Slade's oil rig and horrified by this perversion of her research, Helena uses her technology to escape to the past, knowing that when time catches up, Slade will regain his memories.

As their paths converge, Barry and Helena unite to thwart Slade and prevent misuse of the memory chair technology. They battle Slade's influence and the catastrophic potential of the memory chair in a series of shared timelines. In an early timeline, Barry and Helena kill Slade at Hotel Memory, resulting in Barry's death, government seizure of the technology, and Helena's detention by DARPA. While detained, Helena is forced to cooperate on a project that uses the memory chair for limited benevolent purposes, such as undoing school shootings, but the project is commandeered by the military. Helena's team experiences a dizzying reliving and undoing of various cataclysms and they realize they aren't the only ones with the chair. The technology proliferates among governments, terrorist groups, and companies. Nations scramble to develop their own chairs and threaten military action should the chair be used again. Helena repeatedly travels back to a savepoint in her teens to try to stop the misuse of her technology, but every loop has the same effect: on the date of her departure, the world collectively regains its memories of every prior timeline including knowledge of the chair, resulting in global war.

Helena repeatedly begins a relationship with Barry in her twenties and enlists his aid, but despite their efforts, each attempt to solve the crisis and eliminate false memories fails. Traumatized by her failures and the jumble of multiple timelines in her head, Helena's mental health deteriorates and she dies. Barry decides to end his life, only to be stopped by the resurgence of memories as timeline recollection hits the population. He remembers kidnapping Slade and forcing him to confront the world's iterated annihilation. Slade admits he faked an experimental disaster on the oil rig to ensure Helena believed she would die if she tried to access "dead memory" timelines, but this method is key to overwriting false memories. Barry realizes he must return to the very first timeline, when Slade the lab assistant kills Helena and makes his first time jump. Barry kills Slade the day he would have killed Helena, thereby restoring the original timeline. Finally, Barry reunites with Helena at a bar.

Critical reception

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly described Recursion as an "intelligent, mind-bending thriller". It stated: "Crouch effortlessly integrates sophisticated philosophical concepts into a complex and engrossing plot." Kirkus Reviews called Recursion an "exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender". It said the book is a stimulating exploration of grief and memory and how they define who we are. Rebecca Vnuk wrote in Booklist that readers may not understand the physics behind the story, "but, in a peculiar way, that's part of the fun."

In a review of the book in The New York Times, American author Victor LaValle described Recursion as "a heady campfire tale of a novel built for summer reading". He said the journey it follows "is a gloriously twisting line that regularly confounded my expectations." While all those paranormal podcasts are often rejected as fringe entertainment, LaValle stated "that doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of these shows." He explained that "I'm a skeptic, though not quite an unbeliever". Novels like Recursion tend to be dismissed for similar reasons, but LaValle opined, "I believe they capture the disquiet of millions; they broadcast at an anxious frequency. The sense that our country’s center is not holding pulses through the novel. The fear that we are losing our collective memory, of a stable nation for instance, doesn't read to me like fantasy."

Translations

Recursion was translated into Portuguese as Recursão? and published by Intrinseca in January 2020. It was also translated into German by Rainer Schmidt as Gestohlene Erinnerung and published by Goldmann in March 2020.

External links

• Recursion at Penguin Random House
• Recursion title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Recursion at FantasticFiction