hot take I don’t think I’m going to read any more of these standalone sci-fi twisters written by men (e.g., Recursion) bc they make no sense but clearly are vehicles to get to one cool mic drop scene or monologue.
Is it that these books are sort of written with flashy set pieces that would make for an easy TV adaptation? Perhaps I should just realize that these books are not for me. But I keep getting pulled back into them because I like sci-fi, and I genuinely think that men can write good books and if we don’t give them a chance they’ll never overcome their natural inclinations and truly thrive.
Insofar as I can remember–and it’s not much, because again this entire book is a bunch of bizarre plot points designed to get you to the last few paragraphs where you’re meant to be like OMG (and instead I was like WTF)–our main character is Maggie, 83, who is being desperately questioned by a man named Hassan to help save her husband Stanley from what she thought was an Alzheimer’s nursing facility but is actually the front for a devious organization that can ‘steal’ memories and has been doing so. Many years ago, Stanley was part of a group of extra super smart students at a posh British school who became obsessed with the idea of ‘total, perfect recall’ as separate from just a good memory. If you had perfect recall, you can (deep breath) enter back into the memories you were remembering and (deeper breath and sigh) potentially change things in the memory in such a way that the future would be affected?
(deepest breath and time travel eye-roll) Right so, I should probably have given up there but I was literally stuck on an airplane and figured that I might as well finish. The book gets progressively more and more ludicrous, I don’t think any part of it makes any sense on a basic level, and eventually you move to randomly capitalized words when the deep universal evil is unlocked oh why am I bothering.
Don’t read this. Read something else.
EDITED TO ADD: who is writing these reviews??? Did we read the same book? From Wikipedia:
It received a starred review from Library Journal, describing it as “A mind-blowing science-fiction novel that plumbs the edges of memory and time.” Both Booklist and Kirkus compared the book to the work of Philip K. Dick, the latter commenting that the story “twists and turns like a spacecraft in a wormhole, rocketing toward an unforeseeable and unresolved ending.”
On release in the US, the New York Times highlighted it as one of the month’s best thrillers, calling it “suspenseful, provocative and surprisingly tender.” In the UK, The Herald said that “this mindbender is a genuinely gripping work of speculative fiction”,[9] New Scientist praised it as “an expertly crafted puzzle of a story”and, writing for The Guardian, sci-fi and fantasy columnist Lisa Tuttle called it a “twisty, absorbing thriller [that] is both a moving love story and fascinating speculative fiction exploring memory, time and reality.”