Wizarding School: Uagadou, Uganda
Prompt: Read a book with a symbol on the cover
Format: Hardcover (Book of the Month)

Science fiction, while extremely interesting, borders on vague to me. While I can stomach as much fantasy as you may throw at me, science fiction is not so friendly to deal with. Especially because I am a scientist myself and work with genetic engineering on a daily basis, some concepts of far fetched biotech or physics just can’t seem to agree with my literary composition.

This year, however, I have embarked on this self inflicted resolution to read things I don’t usually read and step out of my comfort zone. And Recursion was my pick to start off with, primarily because so many readers absolutely loved and recommended it.

The story follows a neuroscience experiment gone wrong and the attempts of two protagonists – Helena Smith and Barry Sutton – to fix it. Helena is the unassuming inventor of a technology that can map, store and replay memories – she invents this to help patients with Alzheimer’s as her mother is suffering from it. While she starts off in a Stanford lab in Palo Alto and gets nowhere, a mega investor and venture capitalist finds her and offers her unending funding (quite the dream of someone in academia) to make this. What she doesn’t know, obviously, is that he’s like Lex Luthor – evil. He hijacks her invention and uses it to plant memories, travel back in time, and basically upend human cognition and the concept of memory making. This happens in 2007.

On the other half of the story, we have an NYPD detective, Barry Sutton, a pretty normal American man with a broken marriage and a disturbed past where his daughter dies in a hit-and-run that makes him a sad loner. He chances upon our Lex Luthor while investigating a curious case of False Memory Syndrome in 2018 (and at the time the CDC thinks it’s caused by a virus and is contagious).

All good so far. Helena tries to stop villain from destroying society, Barry and Helena have a strange encounter, somehow fall in love with each other, and then together try to stop villain.

In the meantime, DARPA and the US DoD get hold of this invention and try to use it to stop wars, mass shootings, drone attacks, and the like.

Conceptually this book is great, because it brings out a very well known question of “as humans, the most advanced species on Earth, do we make use of the advantage, or destroy the existence of an advantage in order to maintain balance?” Time as a concept is not linear, it can be manipulated using just the crazy firing of the neurons in one person’s head. The power neuroscience has is beyond limits. Every time a memory and timeline is reset, there is widespread unrest in the world – that’s not good. But when humans came on Earth, it wasn’t such a good start either. When the Industrial Revolution happened, we started with nothing less than war that killed millions – but we are reaping the benefits of the revolution.

However, since the book relies heavily on timeline resets and trying to fix the past and change the present as a concept, large chunks of it are very repetitive and boring. Same scene, different place. Same breakfast, different view. Same hike, different mountain. And since the concept of science fiction can’t be as footloose and fancy free as fantasy, and there needs to be some way to keeping to actual scientific details, it can sometime become quite difficult to follow the plotline.

While Recursion was a great read for science fiction newbie like me, it also fell flat at times and made me want to cut to the ending as soon as I could!

My rating: **** (4/5)