Dark Matter Mass Market Paperback – 27 Mar. 2018

It's alright, but certainly not, "The Most Mind-Blowing And Twisted Thriller Of The Year!" In fact, just a few months after reading it, I'd forgotten I'd read it when I saw it again on Amazon. A number of reviews also discuss how this book is an amazing discourse on advanced physics... spoiler... it's not. Having said all this, it's a perfectly enjoyable action book with a thin veneer of sci-fi, just don't believe the hyperbole.

I’d had this book on my Kindle for a while but had never got round to reading it but it was brought to my attention again after seeing it on a top 50 sci-fi list. I’d never read a book by Blake Crouch before, so I had no real expectations.It’s hard to explain what the storyline is without giving away any spoilers but we follow Jason, a fairly normal guy with a wife and 14-year-old son as he goes from having a quiet family night at home to being abducted at gunpoint, stripped naked and taken to an abandoned warehouse. From there, Jason embarks on a strange journey to try and find his way back home and to his loved ones.Although the actual storyline is pretty complex and various scientific theories are explored, they are presented in a comprehensive manner that makes them accessible to all readers. We learn about alternative universes, alternatives realities, a better or worse or completely different version of yourself and it calls into question all the choices that make you ‘you’.It did take me until nearly half-way through this book to really get into it but once I was in, I was hooked. Dark Matter really starts the action early on and the pace never really slows. Jason is the main character but we meet various other characters along his journey. As others have mentioned, the writing is stilted and can be difficult to get into a flow but I found myself getting used to it fairly quickly.I enjoyed this book, although it felt very familiar to me at times...I am not sure if it is similar to something else I have read maybe. I would recommend this if you are a sci-fi fan and it’s an exciting and quick read.

Jason Dessen has given up a promising future as a top research physicist in favour of a quiet life as a college lecturer with his loving family. Does he regret that choice? Not really but sometimes it does haunt him a little. It’s only when it’s all abruptly taken away that he really realises how important that life and family is to him. Stepping out of the family home to join an old colleague for a quick drink he is abducted and eventually finds himself in a world he cannot understand where he has not only lost his loving family but has never even been married.I really wanted to like this book and, to be fair, some of the time I did but at its core is the idea of infinite universes where anything that could happen, anything that had even the slightest probability of happening, has happened. In the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment both outcomes are true; the universe forks into two universes, in one the cat lives in the other it dies. Now this kind of multiverse theory has always struck me as utterly improbable because if it can happen at major decision points then it will happen at every possible junction; will this atom combine chemically with that one? Possibly yes possibly no. And two more universes are created. If this happens at all then it must happen trillions of times every nanosecond in every universe. There must be a virtually infinite number of universes out there that have been branching ever since the big bang. Now for the sake of the story I might have been able to suspend my level of disbelief sufficiently to ignore this inconvenient infinite creation of matter from nothing had it not been for one ham-fisted attempt at an explanation offered in the book that maybe this could account for the missing matter in our universe – dark matter – except that we’re only missing around 80% of the necessary matter and an infinite number of universes is going to provide rather more than that.So right from the beginning I was struggling with the basic foundation of the story. But again I could have lived with this but the story just didn’t grip me and this is the one bit of surprise inspired by Dark Matter. All the reviews I have read are filled with words like mind-bending, exciting, gripping, compelling, suspenseful etc. etc. and yet I found the whole thing utterly predictable; every – and I mean every single one – every reveal and twist and turn was, to me, so obviously inevitable that I was never once surprised and I’m generally not that good at spotting plot twists before they happen. [spoiler] One of the biggest intended (I’m sure) OMG moments comes towards the end when multiple Jasons all suddenly appear at the same time, the only surprise to me was that there weren’t more; there should have been millions or even billions of them, how many universe branches must have occurred in the couple of months that the book spans?[/spoiler].Dark Matter does explore some interesting ideas about identity and relationships but it was so lacking in anything that felt like novelty to me that I was largely bored by the book. Rather surprising in that almost everyone else praises it for being the exact opposite, so maybe it’s just me.

I am usually not one fast paced thrillers as I often find they follow a similar 'formula' to get from A to B, and a few weeks after finishing it, I can hardly differentiate it from all the others. Dark Matter is definitely not formulaic. I only bought it because I wanted something easy to read whilst on holidays. A week before I headed away I decided to get a start on it and I ended up finishing the book in a couple of days. It was smart, original and very engrossing. Even better, I feel like I have learned something after finishing it. I have seen the book being compared to The Martian, and having seen the film, I can understand why. Crouch explains extremely complex ideas on quantum mechanics and other aspects of the laws of physics in a way that just flows off the page. Only once did I have to reread a paragraph to ensure I understood what was going on (but that had as much to do with fast pace of the book as with its complexity). Indeed, many of the concepts that Crouch brings up stayed with me long after finishing. It comes with many twists and turns but never falls into farce. A great, thought-provoking read that has renewed my enthusiasm for the thriller genre.

The book drew me in with its interesting premise, and the 'science' of this was handled in a very digestible manner. Without giving away any spoilers, I did wonder how the story could ultimately be resolved, and this is executed in something of a 'deus ex machina' fashion. I believe that Blake Crouch has had some success with Book to TV conversions, And can see how Dark Matter could easily translate into a TV series or film. Ultimately, the book will satisfy science fiction lovers, but I feel it ran out of steam a little at the end.