Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Blake Crouch’s science fiction novels are existential in an interesting way. It’s not that they expound existentialist philosophy, or that they represent it symbolically. Rather, they compel the reader to consider their own life without from an existentialist point of view.
Kierkegaard talked about the man who hurries in and out of the scenes of his own life so fast you only ever see the flapping of his coattails as he rushes out the door. The person so engrossed in the past or the future that they never actually live: they lived once, and they’re planning on living again soon, but right now they’re too busy.
In Dark Matter, the protagonist finds out in the worst possible way that his particular life is so valuable that a version of himself from another timeline would commit a terrible crime to steal it from him. It raises every question about identity you can raise. It makes you think seriously about your day-to-day choices.
In writing a novel that grips the reader this way and turns them toward their own life, he’s done a more existential thing that if he had written a book of existential philosophy. Of course, the more existential thing would be for him to really actually live his own life.
And for me to live mine. Instead of writing a review of a novel that might remind somebody to live their life. So, leaving the novel aside…
Hi reader. Your life, your real life, right now, is of great value. If you were able, by some science fictional means, to see it as it really is, you’d walk through fire for it.
Now, the next thing that you’re supposed to be doing? Go and do it.