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A review by thekarpuk
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
2.0
Some perverse part of me gets a kick out of occasionally reading dumb-as-hell page turners. They almost always have good pacing and interesting premises. Dark Matter is the sort of thing people should buy at an airport bookstore. It's shlocky, goes lot of places, and has some amusing twists.
But oh my, this is a stupid book.
That's not what Schrodinger cat is suggesting.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." That's not true and please stop saying this if you currently are, it's a dumb thing to parrot. It's also literally a description of practicing.
It should not take a physicist thing long to figure things out.
Also, the protagonist Jason may be one of the dumber scientists in a fictional work. I've noticed that there's an tendency in dumb fiction: The stupider the work, the higher the volume of geniuses. Dumb stories love geniuses, because they all pretty much have the super power of figuring out how to solve the story problem without providing an adequate or meaningful explanation. You want to know the ultimate example of this? Look at comics created by Marvel or DC comics. Their characters are 80 - 90 percent geniuses.
And now I'm going to have to throw up a spoiler partition, because the last quarter of this book is absolutely bonkers.
So once Jason comes back to his own world to battle the doppelganger who stole his life, Jason2, he realizes about 90 other Jasons split apart during his adventure and also managed to make it back. You could write a whole book about just this premise.
Do they break into tribes? Form a super science group? A confederacy of Jason's storming the multiverse as a brotherhood?
Haha. No. This small army of science teachers just start trying to kill each other like a Battle Royale, with his wife and child as the prize. It's kind of gross, and I think the author even realizes it, because he does some quality lamp-shading of the issue by having Jason's wife complain about this. Not that it actually seems to have any impact on the narrative.
It's just a bummer that he sets up a really interesting premise and goes the dumbest, most macho route possible, one that doesn't even really fit the character's nature. The only really aggressive person in the story is Jason2, so having a platoon of mild-mannered teachers try to out-maneuver him would have been way more interesting.
It's a stupid book, but a readable stupid book, and those get two stars from me.
But oh my, this is a stupid book.
That's not what Schrodinger cat is suggesting.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." That's not true and please stop saying this if you currently are, it's a dumb thing to parrot. It's also literally a description of practicing.
It should not take a physicist thing long to figure things out.
Also, the protagonist Jason may be one of the dumber scientists in a fictional work. I've noticed that there's an tendency in dumb fiction: The stupider the work, the higher the volume of geniuses. Dumb stories love geniuses, because they all pretty much have the super power of figuring out how to solve the story problem without providing an adequate or meaningful explanation. You want to know the ultimate example of this? Look at comics created by Marvel or DC comics. Their characters are 80 - 90 percent geniuses.
And now I'm going to have to throw up a spoiler partition, because the last quarter of this book is absolutely bonkers.
Spoiler
So once Jason comes back to his own world to battle the doppelganger who stole his life, Jason2, he realizes about 90 other Jasons split apart during his adventure and also managed to make it back. You could write a whole book about just this premise.
Do they break into tribes? Form a super science group? A confederacy of Jason's storming the multiverse as a brotherhood?
Haha. No. This small army of science teachers just start trying to kill each other like a Battle Royale, with his wife and child as the prize. It's kind of gross, and I think the author even realizes it, because he does some quality lamp-shading of the issue by having Jason's wife complain about this. Not that it actually seems to have any impact on the narrative.
It's just a bummer that he sets up a really interesting premise and goes the dumbest, most macho route possible, one that doesn't even really fit the character's nature. The only really aggressive person in the story is Jason2, so having a platoon of mild-mannered teachers try to out-maneuver him would have been way more interesting.
It's a stupid book, but a readable stupid book, and those get two stars from me.