Recursion

A detective is called to a New York building where a woman is sitting on a parapet hundreds of feet above the street. He tries to talk her back. She says she can't live with the memories of a second life that flood her mind. She called it FMS, False Memory Syndrome.

The woman is not alone as an increasing number of people suffer from the same thing. The detective does some off-book digging and finds evidence for the other life the woman experiences. But then he finds himself immersed in the same experience.

Recursion is a novel of repeats. Repeated lives, repeated experiences, repeated trauma. Crouch has framed this SciFi theme in a new and well thought out narrative. The science is well done but the standout for me was the character development.

The detective moves from a man running from overbearing grief to somebody intent on making sure that what he experiences stops with him. The scientist is driven by her mother's dementia to find a way of stopping her decline but finds herself in a high stakes battle of wits. Another character thinks he's saving the world while his ego driven desires are endangering everything.

I found myself engaging with the characters at a very personal level. They were not merely shapes on the page but people with widely shared human frailty and struggles. And the wrapping of it all in an exploration of time and memory was skillfully handled.

Recursion has earned a place with such works as the movie Primer and the novels, The Lathe of Heaven and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.