My Thoughts on “Recursion” by Blake Crouch and Time Travel Books

I like books on time travel, even though they often aren’t all that good or original. Part of the problem is the obsession some people have with having the “right” rules for it while other people get stuck in the weeds explaining technology that doesn’t really matter. Most stories also don’t explore just how much time travel would change things. “Recursion” by Blake Crouch isn’t perfect in any of these, but it is an enjoyable book.

The premise of Blake Crouch is fairly simple. A memory researcher is creating a machine that will allow people to copy and relive their own memories, hoping to help her mother, who has Alzheimers. But they discover that if a person dies while reliving one of those memories, they are instead transported back to that moment in time.

The major antagonist of this story is time travel itself. The main character insists from the first moment that she discovers that time travel is possible, that it should never be used and is far too dangerous. As it goes with protagonists, she is entirely correct, and the use of time travel invariably makes things worse. Part of that is the idea of false memory syndrome in which people who have had their lives changed by time travel have memories of their previous life return around the time that the time travel first happened. This is disturbing for people and gets more so as the events become bigger. Beyond that, the basic ideas of time travel are pointed out to be exceptionally dangerous.

Because of the nature of time travel in this book,which involves traveling back to important memories, it gave the author a lot of chances to give you glimpses of the character’s lives. While this was done, I think there was room to go even deeper. We see a few important events from people’s lives, but not as many as we could have, and glimpses of those could have given important insights to the characters easily.

My biggest issue is that much of this book reads more like a thriller than sci-fi. It is fairly common for modern books to be written like action movies. This one did that well, but it’s simply not a style that I look for. If I want an action movie, there are more than enough of them on Netflix that I don’t need to spend the time reading a book and while this didn’t go as far into that as others I could have done with a few less shootouts.

I had read nothing by Blake Crouch before and while I enjoyed Recursion and can certainly understand why it would be popular, it wasn’t the type of science fiction that I look for and it seems unlikely that I will seek more of his work. That said, if you like the action sci-fi genre of books more than me, then you’ll likely love this book because I was drawn in even though it isn’t my preferred genre.