Recursion

Pop-sci-fi. Dan Brown meets HG Wells and introduces him to Tequila. The next morning, massively hungover, they halfassedly write a book before going for breakfast and sobering up. Unfortunately before they get back and toss the draft in the trash, Blake Crouch finds and publishes it.

Very easy reading, burned through it in a week. A very nothingy book though. What even happened?!? Not “what even happened” as in “stuff happened that blew my mind beyond comprehension” but just “did anything actually really happen in this book?” Sure lots happened, but all in a very throwaway manner, that didn't really seem to matter.

There is no characterisation at all. If you sit down for a coffee one day with Barry, what's he like? You can't answer, because you don't know.

Oh and there's a totally freakin' weird Hitler justification casually thrown in the middle for no real reason: “Who's to say the actions of a monster like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot didn't prevent the rise of a much greater monster? ... Without Hitler, an entire generation of immigrants would never have come to the USA” - err ok, I can't even begin to deal with that take but it rEALly mAKeS YoU THinK.

So much of what the characters do and how they behave doesn't make sense, not because it's philosophically difficult but because it's just not how real people act.

It's not a bad book though. The writing is decent - reminiscent of Dan Brown in the “you're reading a movie” feeling but it's not awful by any stretch. The idea behind it is good, it's just... it doesn't really go anywhere. As the book itself says “This is just first-year philosophy shit”.

Yes. Yes it is.