- Publisher: Crown Publishing
- Publish Date: 2016
- Copyright Date: 2016
- ISBN13: 978-1-101-90422-0
- Author: Blake Crouch
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch is a story that makes you think about what your life might have been like had you taken a different path. If a few of your choices had been a little different, where might you have ended up?
Jason Dessen is a physics professor at a small college, living, mostly happily, with his wife and teenage son. While on his way home one night, he is kidnapped and forced to a strange place, assaulted and drugged. When he wakes, he is in some sort of laboratory and people he doesn’t know are celebrating his return. He awakes into a world where he has no wife and no son, and he is a celebrated scientist. Still somewhat impacted by the drugs, and maybe head trauma, he’s not sure which reality is true. Is this world all a hallucination? Is he having some sort of psychotic break? He is able to escape from the lab, and then the search for the truth and the chase from ‘his’ past begins.
Blake Crouch is clearly a talented writer and this book is page turner. There is action and adventure and Crouch keeps you guessing as to what will happen next and how or if he will ever find his way home. He does a good job of suggesting how relatively small decisions multiply in such a way that they could completely alter the life you lead, and maybe the entire universe you inhabit. He leads us through some of these decisions and some of these universes. It is well worth the time to read.
I do have one problem with this book that unfortunately makes me think less of Crouch and this book. There is an explanation of how to have a ‘super position’ where someone can be in multiple universes simultaneously. For this to work, there can be no ‘observation’ of the process as that would cause things to collapse back to a single universe. This explanation was trying to tie the technology in the book to actual quantum theories. This would be OK, except right after explaining that there can be no observation, he goes on to detail everything that Dessen is observing. Crouch violates his own explanation and then tries to cover it up a with a drug that makes the observations somehow not really observations at the quantum level. I do not mind an unexplained technology or a suspension of disbelief in a science fiction story, but it really bothers me when an author contradicts themself, and the weak explanation of why this is not a contradiction makes it even worse. The explanation was not necessary for the story line and could have been easily reworked in a non-contradictory way.
I still recommend Dark Matter. It is a lot of fun and it is thought provoking in its own way. I’ve often thought back on some of the decisions I’ve made in my life and wondered how things might have gone otherwise. I also think about how the decisions I am making today may affect my life and everything else in the future. I think it was Barbara Nelson who originally said one of my favorite quotes/thoughts about science fiction:
“When people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks that they can radically change the future by doing something small.”
Every choice we make has ripples that continue on forever, creating whole new universes, different from what might have been. This book explores that in an interesting and entertaining way. Our decisions, our acts and even our thoughts may have profound implications for the universe in which we live. Choose wisely, or at least get lucky.
Matt’s reviews of other Blake Crouch books:
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For another interesting tale of technology’s promise and peril, try Plastivore by Matt Truxaw
