rae_rif 's review for:

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

4.0

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4.5 stars? i meant to write this right after i finished it...but i really enjoyed this book. i found it thought provoking and well paced. essentially this guy creates this box that has the ability to bring multiple (and infinite) dimensions together, so that when you walk out of the box you could be in an infinite number of parallel universes. some are very similar to ours, where maybe only one thing was different (could be a butterfly effect or not), where as others are vast wastelands that clearly differ from ours a lot. but even those, they seem like nuclear fallout situations, things that could still happen, not like aliens. anyways, the version of him who created this decides he regrets devoting his life to science and instead wishes he had stayed with the girl he knocked up in his 20's. he figures out how to control which parallel universe you enter from the box (its sort of like thinking up the world you want to be in), and he finds the version of himself that settled down and had a family. he abducts that guy, sends him back to his world, and tries to take over his life. his wife and kid can tell something is up, but the changes are small enough they don't do anything, it's not like you would suspect the truth. but the first version slowly pieces it together, and ends up back in the box with another scientist who helped him escape. it takes them a while to figure out they can control the universe they walk into, and i legit thought for a second that the two of them would get together. she seemed into him, and it seemed like they would never find the exact old life he started from, and in some ways, i was ok with that. who are you really when you take away your job/family/etc? but he had more faith than i did, and ultimately amanda left him as she realized he was devoted to finding his old life. and then things got really crazy when he did find grabiella and his kid, but he soon realized that many other versions of him had also figured it out. the author never explained exactly how many jasons there were in that world, but it was clear from the chat rooms that there many (hundreds?). it became an interesting dilemma to think who really deserved to be with the family, since that's what they all wanted. but ultimately the original one was able to isolate his wife and kid and explain the insane situation. even then though, his plan was to get all the jasons together and do a lottery. but gabriella wanted him, and he soon realized that some of the other versions of himself had gone through such an extreme month or so trying to get back to that world that they were much more desperate than he was and were willing to kill as many versions of himself as it took. in the end they got away, and let the son choose the new world (as jason 2.0 had left them ampules to go into the box one more time), which seemed a bit risky to me. i also was curious to explore, could you dream a world similar to ours but without guns/global warming/whatever social cause you are most concerned about?