Dark Matter

A thriller revolving around quantum physics sounds completely out of whack - and in a sense, this book is just that. But it was also was way more of a page-turner than I expected and an unexpectedly easy read too.

Jason Dessen leads a pretty regular life, having a standard job as a physics professor in a college and being in a pretty happy though mundane marriage and family with his wife and son. Things get upended when he is attacked and abducted one night, rendered unconscious, and wakes up in a completely different reality from the one he had known, where his wife is not his wife and his son doesn't even exist.

I was initially a little scared at how long the first chapter ran for - a whopping 80+ ebook pages - but then I realised that so much of it was actually just one-sentence paragraphs. The writing style was rather staccato in nature, but it fit perfectly in the context of this novel, keeping up the quick pace of the action without dragging it down with unnecessarily slow moments. It was also precisely this that made the book such a page-turner for me. It was impossible to put down when something new was happening every other sentence.

Though a huge part of the book revolved around quantum physics, it probably isn't going to be difficult for a layperson to understand. The book pulls upon the concepts in quantum physics of multiverses and Schrodinger's cat, although dark matter in itself didn't actually play that big a part despite the name. It probably just made a catchier book title. I enjoyed the first half of the book immensely when they were setting up this premise, which actually had a huge potential for some great cosmic horror here, what with infinite versions of your world and yourself, how would Jason ever find his way back?

The second half kinda derailed a bit for me. I thought the fact that they could "control" the box by having an idea of what kind of world they wanted to see was a bit of a convenient plot point. It also made the middle part of the book feel a bit pointless, like when he's exploring the post-apocalyptic worlds with Amanda Lucas, and why there was a brief almost-attraction with her. Why she was even there in the first place, only to literally just disappear off stage? I also actually would've liked it more if he had gotten more and more disconnected with the reality that he had been in, and then kinda decided to live some Doctor Who lifestyle with Amanda Lucas as just being outside of all the realities. At some point I felt that Jason was starting to feel disconnected with the life he once had, and I actually would've preferred if he had gone down that route too, questioning whether the life he had had was really all that worth it.I really liked and preferred that sense of hopelessness Jason had fleetingly, where trying to find his way home home was like trying to find a grain of sand on an infinite beach. That was, I thought, the most realistic scenario considering the concepts the book was based on. I might even have preferred if Jason had simply gone mad by the end, or had decided to end his life in the box knowing that he had been cast adrift. Basically, an ending to really drive home the cosmic horror of having invented and unleashed something like the box, where you could basically get lost in all of infinity, or even just contemplating the sheer infinite versions of yourself/your universe/your decisions.

All in all though, this was a reallyyy fun and quick read, which might at least set you thinking a bit more about the possibilities of quantum physics than you bargained for.