Recursion 1: General thoughts
What did you think of the book in general? Any particular thoughts (positive or negative) provoked about playing rpgs or games more generally? If your response was 'meh,' what was lacking?
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Overall, I quite enjoyed the book. I read it over the course of a week while on vacation in Portugal, so I fairly zipped through it, considering I had other things going on. I thought the writing was lively enough, the story intriguing and there was enough going on, intellectually, to satisfy me. It had a Big Idea, which I like in SF. The characters were engaging, and their relations touching. I really didn't find the whole 'memory-time-travel' thing to be very convincing and kept scratching my head at it, but I also found that understanding it wasn't really important, and I like the concept of going back to 'restart'. Often, with these 'groundhog day' type stories, the repetition of going back gets boring, but I don't think I was ever bored in this book, so I;d say it was well-handled.
I liked the book and finished it very quickly - so clearly it had me compelled to get on with it. Like @Apocryphal I had some reservations about some aspects - I agree that the memory trigger was odd, and I didn't like the specific way he resolved the whole thing. By which I mean that he had piled up the whole situation into an apparently insoluble pile, then having painted himself into a corner just pulled an ad hoc rabbit out of the hat. Too much like Alexander and the Gordian Knot for me.
I also felt it owed a very great deal to some other plots. The stand out most obvious (to me) was Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, though she, unsurprisingly, preferred a psychological/spiritual dimension to a technological one. But I found when trying to describe Recursion to a friend that I kept on saying things like, "well, this bit was like such-and-such", and my whole explanation made it sound more like a mixture of other books and fairy tales than I think it actually was.
Probably the most interesting twist on the idea was the concept that at the point when the timelines coincided, everyone remembered both histories. The mathematician in me balked a little at the implicit idea that there was a universal absolute timeline that you could lay everything out along (ie the concept of the simultaneous moment that everyone arrived at together) but that didn't stop me enjoying it. Probably my biggest mathematical hangup was in fact the name "recursion" - I just couldn't see anything recursive, in the strict meaning of the term, in it. But I guess "Near Repetition" would not have been such a catchy title
A bit like watching Source Code and expecting some, well, source code to turn up sometime...
Like others, I enjoyed it. I read it quickly, so it must have held my attention. The writing was clear and snappy.
Like @RichardAbbott , I was underwhelmed by the deus ex machina ending: how was Helena able to discover a way to remove false memories in her original timeline, but never stumbled across the same ability in all her subsequent lifetimes?
The idea of travelling back in time to undo and rewrite history reminded me of Palimpsest, a novella by Charie Stross of people going back and changing the past to rewrite the present.
I really enjoyed this one. In terms of sheer enjoyment, it's one of my favourite book club reads. It felt a little like a Michael Crichton story at first, but much better written. And finished in two days, although with a break between the first third and the last two thirds; I couldn't put it down.
I liked it being big idea science fiction, but driven by characters- or by people's experiences to be more accurate. The time travel mechanism was internally consistent, and I got the impression one it that worked in a different way to how the scientists thought it worked. I also liked the way things escalated and got worse, and the true immensity of the explanation of false memory syndrome. For this, I appreciated reading the book without reading any blurb first, and not knowing it was about time travel before I started.
The ending was a bit of a fiddle, and contradicted one of the ideas set out near the start about dead timelines - but of course, that was only an assumption. And there wasn't really any other way to resolve things. It was decent enough, and worked for the characters just fine.
I felt it was skill directed towards a not-very worthy purpose. It seems clear to me that playing with friends produces far more good than reading this book, and others like it. People seem to get addicted to genres, which suggests something, but I don't know what.
I think it's conservatism. People find something they enjoy and want to stick with it, over trying new stuff and running the risk of not liking it.
It's not an irrational desire: why risk your precious time on something you're likely to hate?
But it takes me out of my comfort zone, and that's a good thing.
Very much my thoughts too. The curation here means it's very rare we read anything bad. Things may not be to my taste, but that's a very different judgement.
I liked it all the way around. Great characters, interesting situation, good writing, what more can you ask for? The ingredients of a great game as well.
@clash_bowley How would you structure that game?
@Apocryphal - I just meant great characters and interesting situations were the ingredients of good games. This was a novel, not a game, and novels don't make for good games, though sometimes the setting is worth exploring.