Dark Matter
One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something impossible. Is it this world or the other that's the dream? How can he possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could have imagined--one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.
Stats for nerds
20recommend
29mentions
27people
2016–2026years
76% recommend17% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > It describes most Blake Crouch and Peter Clines novels.
I vaguely recall liking Dark Matter. I've still got Recursion on a shelf around here somewhere waiting to be read. Still haven't read any Peter Clines. Now I'm not sure I want to. :-)
- Unfortunately many of the books I had time to read this year were a bust. But here's some of the ones I did appreciate very much:
* Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive - Philipp Dettmer.
* The Gene: An Intimate History - Mukherjee. Won't necessarily teach you much new if you've already read a few genetics books, but a fine read nonetheless.
* On Sophistical Refutations - Aristotle. Like anything by Aristotle, read it with a grain of salt and as historical document. Still, it's always a wonder how a text like this can be over 2000 years old.
* Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI - David Grann. Skip the movie and read this instead.
* 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles Mann. It challenges common misunderstandings of pre-columbian society without being anti-Columbus.
* American History, Combined Edition: 1492-Present - Thomas Kidd. Goes beyond just the usual narratives we are all familiar with. Not recommended as a first American-history deep-dive, but a fine supplement.
* The Man Who Saved Cincinnati - Peter Bronson. Entertaining civil war history book. It's not only about Cincinnati.
* Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power - Carwardine.
* The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets - Thomas Cech. RNA is now kinda required reading since 2020. This is a good starting point.
* The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie - Dawkins. His latest is definitely worth a read, like (nearly) all his previous.
* Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI - Harari. How information traveled historically, with modern technology, and in the near future. Enlightening and a little scary.
* Beauty and Sadness: Mahler's 11 Symphonies - David Vernon. Even if you haven’t listened to all of Mahler’s symphonies, still very interesting read on “the first modern composer.” If you /are/ familiar with all his symphonies, the book is even better, and it will show you layers you didn’t realize were there... in case the music isn't dense enough to absorb by itself ;-)
Fiction:
* Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir.
* Dark Matter - Blake Crouch.
* Red Rising - Pierce Brown. A light read, maybe will seem derivative at this point but it was fun.
* Rifters Trilogy - Peter Watts. Super bleak, very creative.
* You Like It Darker - Stephen King. Another fine collection of short stories.
* The Forest of Lost Souls - Koontz
* House of Leaves - Danielewski. I waited way too long to read this. As good as everyone said it would be.
- I did Recursion, Upgrade and Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and they were all really fun easy reads. Highly recommended.
- I think top prize has to go to the first book I read in 2024 - 'Dark Matter' by Blake Crouch. It's a little different from the sci-fi I usually read like Liu or Banks, as it reads more like Stephen King and is weirdly terrifying in places. Cherry on the cake was finding out that it was being made into a TV show and watching it several months later. And the show being almost as good as the book, which was unexpected. The rest of my 2024 reading has been tech books like: SICP:JavaScript Edition. WebGPU sourcebook. 3D Math Primer - which is now an online book - https://gamemath.com/ Beej's guide to C programming, also a free, online book - https://beej.us/guide/bgc/
- My fav sci-fi books are:
Ubik by Philip K Dick
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Recursion by Blake Crouch
Highly recommended
- The entire "Murderbot" series by Martha Wells is amazing, the writing style, humor and the whole story line is a must-read for sci-fi fans
The "Silo" series by Hugh Howey is excellent, I read it after watching the TV series from Amazon, and no regrets.
"Recursion" and "Dark Matter" by Blake Crouch is also really great
