Starred review from January 1, 2025
A mind-blowing science-fiction novel that plumbs the edges of memory and time. The story begins with Maggie trying to support her husband, Stanley, as his dementia progresses. Maggie meets a mysterious man who tells her that her husband doesn't actually have dementia; instead, Stanley's memory is waning because he is the subject of a secret experiment from which he must be rescued. The novel alternates between Maggie's story in the present day and flashbacks to Stanley's past as he grows up to be the brilliant man his wife now knows and loves. Stanley's story is that of a gifted child who finds his way to a prestigious school as a scholarship student, and from there encounters a quirky professor who's willing to take him under his wing. The mystery of Stanley's mind and memory unravels as Maggie uses the stranger's technology to travel back in time and space through her own recollections, in a novel about memory, what it means to be human, and the nature of time itself. VERDICT Binge's (Ascension) latest offers a profound depth of ideas wrapped in a thrilling sci-fi story.--Jeremiah Rood
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February 7, 2025
If Binge's well-reviewed previous novel, Ascension (2023), was Lovecraftian, his latest work is straight out of Philip K. Dick. Maggie Webb is an 83-year-old woman married to Stanley, who resides in a care home called Sunrise. Stanley is there because he is losing his memory. Or is he? Much of the novel is structured as a discussion between Maggie and Hassan, a shadowy figure who is convinced that Stanley is no ordinary Alzheimer's patient. Fiction framed as a conversation can be tiresome, but Binge offers up enough action to distract readers from the artifice. Hassan tells Maggie that Stanley's memories aren't just fading--they're being erased. Stanley is being erased. And it is up to Maggie to save him. Why is this happening? Readers find that out in the noncolloquy sections, which narrate Stanley's secret past. Binge transports Dick's nightmare landscapes, surrealism, and paranoia to his native United Kingdom, which adds a soup�on of Agatha Christie to the mix. Dissolution, then, is a hat trick of a novel, combining science fiction, mystery, and adventure.
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March 15, 2025
With shades of Philip K. Dick, a dystopian novel that probes the darker corners of the mind. Stanley Webb is in a bad way, as so many of his age: He's in a memory ward, sinking into dementia, leaving his wife to tend single-handedly to a house that's too large for her. Maggie--the true hero of Binge's involving novel--is the second person to speak in the story; the first is a disembodied voice that announces, "I'm Hassan. Do you remember me?" Hassan offers an unsettling thought: Stanley isn't suffering from Alzheimer's, but instead, holed up in a nursing home cheerily called Sunrise, he's having his memories selectively harvested. Someone is looking for something, that is, and that something goes all the way back to Stanley's school days, when a mad-scientist tutor recruits him and two other teens, Raph and Jacques, into a secret project that's designed to expand their memories--for, as Stanley brightly puts it, "If memory is what makes us human, then surely being able to remember more makes usmore human." Soon enough Stanley, competing with his friends, is memorizing pi to the thousandths of places, memorizing Shakespeare--Romeo and Juliet is an important leitmotif--and learning all about the concept called the apeiron, which, Stanley hazards, is "kind of like whatever existed before the big bang." Fast-forward to an adult future, and it's now Jacques' turn to play the role of mad scientist--mad with a bent toward some very apocalyptic ends and, as he assures Maggie, quite prepared to "roll Stanley in here and slice open his throat in front of you." Time travel, mass extinction, the end of the world: It's all here in a storyline that twists and turns like a spacecraft in a wormhole, rocketing toward an unforeseeable and unresolved ending. A nimbly constructed story that starkly explores the dangers of neuroscience run amok.
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