“Recursion” by Blake Crouch (2019)

<SPOILER WARNING>

I think the author got the main concept from this book from video games. Specifically, how you can save your game, and reload to get back to a previous save point. In the book, a neuroscientist studying memory creates “the chair”, meant as an immersive memory replay device. Along the way, she stumbles upon a way to actually return to a past vivid memory and relive life from that point. If we can trick our brain into completely reliving a past memory, and then die, we’ll actually go back in time to that point. There’s some mumbo-jumbo explanation about how memory is the only thing really providing us a “direction” for time – all things are really happening simultaneously, yadda yadda. Hmmm…. ok author I’m suspending my disbelief! (Note, the whole dying bit reminded me a bit of the movie “The Prestige.”)

But there’s a catch. When someone jumps back to an old memory, they basically create a new branch of the timeline. The old, “dead memories” are still a valid timeline. When the new timeline reaches the point in time where the old timeline stopped (when someone used the chair to go back in time), suddenly everyone remembers that whole other timeline. Sometimes this is just too much to mentally handle, particularly for cases where that timeline was especially worse or better than the new one. Soon things get out of hand – mass suicides, etc. Worse, nuclear-powered nations declare any detection of chair use to be an affront to their sovereignty, since who knows what tinkering might have been done to affect the global balance of power? Soon, all possible timelines are devolving into global nuclear destruction at the time when everyone “wakes up” to their past timelines.

Confused yet? I thought the concept was kind of cool, but still didn’t quite make total sense. Particularly the resolution, which seemed to break the established rules: why did the protagonist get to keep memories of past timelines, since he was still before the (future) branch point? Why did it being the “original” timeline matter at all – wouldn’t those other branches still exist and still come crashing into everyone’s heads on the fateful date in 2019?

It turns into kind of a love story in the end, which was kind of ugh … getting the characters together didn’t really make much sense to me either.