I read this immediately after Cixin Lui’s Three Body Problem Trilogy, and in my review of it I compared it to fine dining – to stretch the analogy, this book is like an ice-cream sundae – fun, enjoyable but not quite as satisfying. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like it – I liked it a lot, but The Three Body Problem was a hard sci-fi act to follow.
In Recursion, a scientist studying how the brain stores memories with a view to helping Alzheimer’s patients, stumbles across a world changing scientific discovery.
SPOILERS
A patient suffered a fatal heart attack while recalling a vivid memory in the sensory depravation chamber set up she used in her studies. Apparently, immediately after death, and before the brain completely shuts down, there’s a surge in the chemical that makes you see vivid images in your mind, like memories or dreams. Then the book gets a bit woolly about multi dimensions and time being a plane rather then a straight line and this super strong memory in the machine caused a warp in space time etc which basically sent the person’s awareness back in time to re-inhabit themselves from the past but with the memories of their whole as yet unlived life.
So lots of applications like saving loved ones from fatal accidents, or stopping wars or getting rich on the stock market etc, but things got weird with people getting ‘false’ memories, or double memories and then when all the world’s superpowers learned how to make their own time machines, the book’s hero had to find a way to prevent the whole world blowing itself up!
It was a fun sci-fi thriller with some nice love story elements and moral dilemmas and so forth. I enjoyed it.
Sarah Wray Writer 