Novel Review—Blake Crouch’s Recursion

In my most recent post, I mentioned Blake Crouch’s Recursion as a sci-fi thriller. I liked it a lot and figure it deserves a review.

Ground Rules

Before I share the review, a quick note on commentary philosophy. I was raised in a home in which all were taught that if you had nothing nice to say about someone or something, you didn’t say anything at all. This is very good advice. I try to live by it, though being human, I often fail to. My reviews will be honest but never critical. There’s enough criticism floating around the internet to say nothing of downright nastiness and mean-spiritedness, not just directed at books but virtually any idea, opinion, or group one can name.

If I write a review of a novel, movie, or show, it’s because I finished reading or watching it, which means I liked it. I’ve bailed on lots of things that failed to keep my interest. I will tell you why I liked it, and if you like those same attributes, you will learn something useful about a novel you have not yet read. And if you don’t like those things, you will similarly have a better vantage point from which to decide if you want to read something.

Also, I try to write spoiler-free reviews.

A Simple Detective Story to Start

Blake Crouch’s Recursion starts out with a contemporary storyline set in 2018. NYPD detective Barry Sutton is investigating a series of events associated with something called False Memory Syndrome (FMS), a condition that causes people to have memories of lives they have not lived. FMS has no known cause, but it’s spreading and leading to much mayhem. This idea was the novel’s description hook that initially intrigued me. Sounded awesome. So I bought the book.

Detective Sutton’s investigation leads him to a shadowy lab where weird and presumably dastardly things are going on with people who may or may not be patients. I can’t tell you what happens next, but it upends poor Mr. Sutton’s life in a big way. At this point in the novel—though ten years earlier in the overall story timeline—we meet neuroscientist Helena Smith working diligently on a cure for Alzheimer’s. This storyline has a great sci-fi feel with a secret lab in a secret bunker (not really a bunker, but isolated) and a decent amount of grounded science about how human memory works and speculative science about how tinkering with it can have unimaginable consequences.

The two storylines and two protagonists eventually meet, and the stakes escalate quickly. Already high at the start of the novel, they quickly go nuclear. The fate of the world hangs in the balance while the relationship between Barry and Helena evolves in a way intrinsically tied to the overall plot.

The science in Blake Crouch’s Recursion is a good mix of grounded and speculative. He presents enough to make it make sense, but the rest of the story is about the characters, the mystery, and the stakes. I would have been okay with stakes that didn’t get so world-embracing, but their scale is appropriate to the story.

DARPA Doesn’t Have Agents

An amusing side note that in no way is meant as a criticism. Later in the novel, Helena gets in trouble with agents from DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a very famous and very real-world research funding agency run by the U.S. Department of Defense. Note I said funding agency. DARPA doesn’t do any research and has never invented anything. It gives money to outside researchers to create things, including some of the most revolutionary technology ever conceived.

Just as it never invents stuff on its own, neither does it ever use any of the fancy technology whose development it funds. It gives money to outside entities to create cool new tech, and if that cool tech proves useful, the U.S. Armed Forces find a way to use it in the execution of its mission. DARPA employees work in offices pushing paper around. Very important paper, yes, but it’s just paper. They don’t do secret agent stuff. So in the real world, our good friend and noted neuroscientist Helena could never “get in trouble” with DARPA unless maybe she broke into their cafeteria and stole all the strawberry milk mix. I would know. I once worked on a project for them. Really.

I will quickly remind everyone, however, that Blake Crouch’s Recursion is a novel. The author is completely justified in creating DARPA agents who do secret spy stuff. It’s called fiction. And entertaining fiction it is.