They were digging into the idea of implanting false memories in the brains of mice. I started going through my process, which is spending a lot of time going through articles and seeing what the latest breakthroughs have been, and I found this article in the Smithsonian that was describing this experiment a couple of MIT neuroscientists completed in 2010. I kept feeling this strong attraction to memory as a central concept. So I’m going through all my journals and I kept coming back to this obsession with memory, with how much memories define us, not just our identity but how we interact with others, how we see reality. I set it aside and I was sort of looking at the blank page and going through my journals, which is something I do in between books-I take a lot of notes on possible story ideas, characters, and science. I got about 150 or 60 pages into it, and I didn’t feel like I quite had my arms around the technology it had to do with artificial intelligence in the video gaming world, and while there was a lot of stuff I loved about it, I didn’t think I had a full grasp of where it was going and where I wanted to take it. I started writing another book pretty soon after Dark Matter was published. It was not the first thing I did after Dark Matter. He’s had what he calls a serpentine writing career, from his first novel published in 2004 to moments of doubt in the late 2000s to recent successes like Wayward Pines (adapted for Fox with episodes airing from 2015–16), Dark Matter (currently in development with Sony), and now Recursion.īlake lives and works in Durango, Colorado. When we caught up with Blake in late August, he was relaxing between books, spending his days playing outside with his three kids, hiking with his dog BoJack, and trying to figure out what his next novel would look like.

A story of memories saved, changed, and manipulated, it’s the toughest book Blake says he’s written yet. That’s where genius ideas for his thrilling works of science fiction are born, in drawings and scribbles on ruled paper, like “4th dimension = length + width + depth + duration (time)” and “Wormholes are dimensional?” It was scribbles like these, made in 2014, that paved the way for Recursion, the 2019 science fiction novel that was so exciting it was picked up by Netflix before the book even hit shelves. Peek at any one of the dozens of j ournals inside Blake Crouch’s Durang o, Colorado home, and he may seem a bit p eculiar.

Wayward blake crouch