Recursion

Adult sci-fi doesn't tend to be my thing, but I enjoyed this more than I was expecting to. With enough suspended disbelief, especially in how the story resolves, I was compelled to keep reading until the end. The story was twisty and interesting, with each part (6 in all) revealing another telescoping layer of the world he's built. My students that have read it said they were confused, so I'm not sure I'd recommend it for YA, but I don't think I'll forget this book.

Recensie van audioboek (via Storytel)
Het duurde even voor ik een klik maakte met dit boek en zijn personages. Het verhaal dat zich ontplooit is diep fascinerend, maar het was pas toen de gebeurtenissen in een stroomversnelling kwamen dat ik me ook emotionele betrokken voelde en het boek nog met moeite opzij kon leggen.

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There's no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It's all happening now.”

Dit boek mixt concepten als herinneringen, realiteit en het idee van de rechtlijnige tijd, tot een complexe, bloedstollende en intelligente thriller, waarbij je niet anders kan dan jezelf de vraag te stellen: “Wat zou ik doen?”

Opwindend, verbijsterend, uitdagend en een tikkeltje beangstigend. Aanrader voor wie houdt van unieke, slimme en menselijke Sci-Fi verhalen.

“Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human - the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

My favorite book of 2020 by a very large margin.

This book kept me up way past my bedtime. As a general rule, I am a sci-fi skeptic. I'm not a big fan of aliens, robots, or pretentious sci-fi jargon. However, this book takes scientific/futuristic concepts like memory modification and alternate yet parallel realities, and makes them relatable and thoroughly petrifying. The love story is subtle but intense. AND THE CLIFF HANGER! Ugh! Loved it.

Interesting idea, but the ‘recursion' became increasingly tedious

Existentialism wrote a sci-fi novel and I kinda liked it!

Seriously, I think this is one of the better approaches to time travel that I've ever seen.

It was bit too recursive at time (lol) but a good read overall.

There's quite a few plot holes and it spends a lot of time stuck in certain plot points that really don't matter. But there's some beautiful depth of character in several scenes. I love a story that can take an interesting and unique notion and carry it to far reaching impacts on a story.

This book caused me to reevaluate my life, to ponder where my life would be and what makes a good one. I'm a little confused why the author decided that the best life possible was hiking and looking at pretty things.

This was a fascinating and engaging sci-fi novel. One of the best that I've read in recent memory. I love exploring the concepts of memory and time travel. Well done. You are going to want to read this one.

What if you had memories of things that never happened. For example a husband and child you'd never had. This is what False Memory Syndrome (FMS) is. What if you found out that FMS is the result of time travel.
This book was really interesting. I kept rooting for Helena. It was realistic in the fact that time travel had consequences. What if the time machine got into military hands or a group of people who want to use it for evil?
Good story and great main characters.I'd recommend it to my friends.

Blake Crouch is a master writer of Sci Fi page turners and this book proves it. It is no mean feat to have two consecutive books that are so good. A perfect follow up to the mind bending “Dark Matter”, this story lives up to the expectations that a Blake Crouch novel has.

It's a true page turner and is a great catalyst to get one back into the habit of reading. Just like Dark Matter, The Martian.

Talking about the plot, in the beginning, when the core scifi plot item is revealed, it does seem to be similar to Dark Matter, but it actually turns out to be really different.
Blake crouch's scifi always has a very human story and it's true in this one too.

I'm glad to read this one before the year ends(quick and easy addition to the Reading Challenge :p)

great book overall, really interesting concept and that totally transforms this book into a page turner. Really thrilling experience, runs out of steam a little bit out at the end since it feels like the writer got himself into a writing block corner. But it ended beautifully anyways.

Above 4 but not completely 5 because the beginning was a bit slow and I put the book down for a good while, and then binge-read it in the last 3 hours.

The last 100 pages were just hell over and over again, and so mesmerizing and agonizing to read. I loved the story and the execution. The endless iterations, the meetings, trusting someone enough to live through hell over and over again. The relationships in this book were a lot stronger as the plot revolved around them.

This was very different from Dark Matter and I enjoyed it immensely. Realistic science fiction done right.

Just a brilliant, compelling, thought provoking read.
Second book from Blake I've read, and yet another home run.
Loved it from start to finish.

Quit about halfway in.

I have read Dark Matter and I remember finding it fine, but not at all memorable, as I don't remember shit about it. Not the characters (there was a man... and a woman?), not the plot, not even the big concept behind it. Nothing.
This one is pretty much the same in that the characters don't really do much to me. I guess they are there and that's all I could be expecting from them, but this is supposed to be big and emotional. I should genuinely feel for them and go with them through some very challenging and personal events, but I'm just sitting here, going MEH.
The present tense doesn't help with it. I guess that ties into the mumbo jumbo about the past, the present and the future just not being a thing and stuff, but even spelled out that whole idea made me roll my eyes more than feel like it's very deep and such. The whole science part of the book made me feel like that, to be honest. Why? Because this book is fundamentally about time travel, explained through a bunch of nonsensical things.

The story happens to two people, in two times, an investigator and a scientist. Neither have that much of a unique voice, neither provokes too much empathy in me and with the investigator guy it's also pretty baffling as his story is that his daughter dies as a teenager, but he gets sent back and changes things. I get it, life is weird, it's emotionally taxing, but the way him and his wife who eventually figures stuff out just act almost... sad... PFFFT. I don't get it.

All in all, I didn't like this. It wasn't as exciting as I hoped, the science made no sense, the characters were extremely flat. The emotional load was nowhere to be found, the prose was meh. I just... I don't like this one much. Everyone else does, though, so there is that.

Decent sci-fi read, not terribly challenging, perhaps a bit overly grim towards the end, but entertaining all round.

After reading The Three Body Problem, I feel like sci-fi might be spoilt for me if it's not rooted deeply in hard science! Though Recursion does stem from a real world MIT experiment (amazingly) it's more akin to the romantic notion of sci-fi (if that's even a thing!).

The book splits pretty cleanly into three phases: 1. setup and drama, 2. sci-fi, time travel, action, 3. world ending disaster and reconciliation.

I felt like the first part was a little underwhelming, wondering where the story was going and what these two characters had to do with each other: Helena and Barry.

Thankfully this is cleanly answered in the second part where some interesting ideas are at play: specifically being able to travel back to a memory and “fork” reality off into a new timeline. Though it's only mentioned briefly, it feels like this a nod to four dimensions.

The last part when the characters decide they have to save the world - though apparently it's just down to one person not only being responsible for the end of the world but also be responsible for stopping it.

The book does its best to tell some fairly horrific tales of how the world would end - though this is very American-centric, but as the characters are based in the states, I'd imagine this is because it's their point of view. The descriptions of skin melting off and sores and blisters and radiation burning and all of that is fairly graphic. I can't decide if it made this part of the story more harrowing or if it just felt grotesque.

There's also large chunks of scenes where the protagonists are such incredible pain (the skin from a handprint peeling off and sticking to the walls) that I wondered how they were supposed to actually perform anything, instead of passing out from internal failure. But still, it's just a story!

Overall, a decent read, not super challenging and explored some “fun” ideas with time travel and the concepts of what reality might be.

Pleasantly enough written I suppose and mostly the characters are drawn OK.
But the main conflict in the book that the characters are fighting to overcome is that the premise is stupid. They never overcome this.
The plot comes off as a mixture of the movie Groundhog Day, Philip José Farmer's Riverworld, and John Wood Campbell's Invaders from the Infinite (probably the worst science fiction book ever written, though I have no desire to read other contenders to evaluate that claim).
Having a plot that is too twisted to be resolved, the ambiguous Capriccio-style ending strikes me as more of a simple cop-out than a bit of profundity.

what if we kissed.... on the memory chair.... while the world is ending for the 7th time? haha I'm just kidding......... unless...??

It's a little slow to get into, but the explanations are necessary. This is an amazing ride.

Mindbending book. Couldn't put it down. Blake Crouch makes me appreciate my life more.

Just entertaining enough of a concept to keep reading but overall not a very good book

4.0 out of 5 stars

A dynamic “what if” novel that builds and builds as the unintended consequences of messing with memories threaten to unmake the world.

I was worried that the mind bending nature of the story would be too hard to follow, but Crouch doles out the complexity slowly and never piles on too much quantum theory at once. I read this in one sitting and really enjoyed my time with it. It's quickly paced and features well-drawn, sympathetic characters. My main quibble is that the ending did not live up to the great buildup that came before it.

With back-to-back sharp, page-turning sci-fi thrillers, Blake Crouch has certainly found a genre sweet spot for his writing talents. If you liked Recursion, definitely check out Crouch's Dark Matter or Elan Mastai's All Our Wrong Todays for something similar with a lighter touch.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

Great Read! With similar DNA to the previous book, Dark Matter, there was a danger this one could feel repetitive; however, the different plot device allows for very different exploration of scenarios and how they could effect a person.

Loved this book. Read it. Fast paced thriller about time travel. Keeps you wanting more. Didn't want it to end, yet couldn't get there fast enough.

This read is a slow burn, ignited by alternating realities into a blazing inferno! Crouch cleverly uses memory as a transportation device, and takes us through time and ‘space' to undo one travesty after another, but to what end? I couldn't believe the heart-pounding side effects reading this one, could-not-put-down, doesn't begin to cover it.