“Recursion” is a sci-fi novel from Blake Crouch. What if someone could rewrite your entire life? “My son has been erased.” Those are the last words the woman tells Barry Sutton before she leaps from the Manhattan rooftop. Deeply unnerved, Sutton begins to investigate her death only to learn that this wasn’t an isolated case. All across the country, people are waking up to lives different from the ones they fell asleep to. Are they suffering from False Memory Syndrome, a mysterious, new disease that afflicts people with vivid memories of a life they never lived? Or is something far more sinister behind the fracturing of reality all around him? Miles away, neuroscientist Helena Smith is developing a technology that allows us to preserve our most intense memories and relive them. Smith is seeking a cure for Alzheimer’s in the hope of curing her mother’s terminal descent into dementia. Her plan is to construct a machine that can record a person’s most valued memories. If she succeeds, anyone will be able to re-experience a first kiss or the birth of a child. Sutton’s search for the truth leads him on an impossible, astonishing journey as he discovers that Smith’s work has yielded a terrifying gift. It could change the world forever. With a narrative built around questions of memory and consciousness, the descriptions of the characters’ memories are particularly vivid and convincingly tangible. The stakes are colossal, the characters are the perfect propelling forces of the story, and the big reveals are placed at exactly the right moments. (SD-Agencies) |