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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1392 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 7, 2026

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Been making my way through a fiction backlog. Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook an obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration with only a relatively thin plot justification for the oversight, but if you can accept that (and the very simplistic prose) the story's good fun.

Read The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch on Saturday after having it on the back burner for a while; it was entertaining for a bit but the prose was clunky and story-wise it felt all over the place, since it was trying to pull together so many elements - murder mystery detective plots, apocalypse scenarios, time travel (of a sort), deep space travel, incomprehensible starfish aliens, timeline-hopping Nazi vigilante groups, and more - and it never felt particularly unified as a result. The book doesn't always explore these plot points to its fullest extent and threatens to become incoherent under the weight of its own story a lot, and I never got the sense that there was an underlying gestalt to the entire story, which is something I generally like with twisty sci-fi. Also somehow nobody ever sees an ethical problem with creating whole temporary universes filled with people who think and feel, all of whom will blink out of existence once the traveller leaves.

Currently on Quarantine by Greg Egan and enjoying it a lot so far, though some of the futurism has aged rather poorly in retrospect.

Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook a relatively obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration, but if you can accept that the story's good fun.

I was not a particular fan of that book, and you've amply described the reasons why, though I'll add that I'm not generally a fan of using present tense for fiction, either. There are special circumstances where it's just fine to do so, of course, but for me, it didn't work in Recursion and ended up being One More Thing that annoyed me about the novel.

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