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Recurrence Plot: And Other Time Travel Tales
The interweaving stories in Recurrence Plot and Other Time Travel Tales present characters whose stories challenge the notion that time flows in only one direction. If you want to understand what is happening at any given point in time, you cannot only look to the past for clues. You must consider the future. A journalist races against time itself to expose the entity preying on young male teens in Philadelphia. A crystal, memory-storing bracelet transports a young mother back to the day of her own mother’s traumatic death. An unknown force of nature causes time to start flowing backwards. . . Using quantum physics as an imaginative landscape, Phillips� debut speculative collection Recurrence Plot attempts to walk the fine line between fiction and reality, fate and free will, and past, present, and future.
240 pages, Paperback
First published March 16, 2014
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320 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 19, 2014
Time travel, zines, neurobiology, racism, choose your own adventure books, quantum physics, memory, Robert Anton Wilson, the prison-industrial complex, astrology... the number of disparate ideas and influences Philips incorporates into the complex structure of this books would be admirable simply for her ambition alone. That she pulls it off in a novel/book of short stories which manages to be intricately experimentally structured without ever feeling completely opaque is a major accomplishment. This book is a masterpiece by a major new talent, and is not to be missed.
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October 20, 2018What a wild ride this was. Conceptually, it was fascinating, and the style of it made you (well, me) feel like a character **in** it. There were some excellent lines in it, too:
--We see the past at the speed of thought.
--Bars on the windows painted a dark art of lines and space upon every object standing in the path of light streaming into the room.
--Memory, like light, wraps itself around all objects in a room. Each object and item is recording the space-time event from its own perspective.
--The mantle of her consciousness gave way like wax paper walls.
But at times I was just paging through rather than reading with absorption. Part of what gives the story its cool effect are all the quotes, both real and fictional, on various topics--but, paradoxically, some of them are pretty impenetrable, so I just let them give a flavor to the story but didn't read them carefully.
There also isn't a story with a conventional structure here--characters and plot elements are carried over from one section to another, and certain themes and ideas are developed through the overall book, but overall it's more like a collection of meditations on time, memory, and personal and collective history. It's strange: for me the book was simultaneously fascinating and yet hard to stick with and actually read; I admired its imagination but am not sure I enjoyed it all that much. Still, at just $1.99 for the Kindle version, it's worth taking a chance on. You'll get something out of it even if you bounce off parts or can't 100 percent commit to it.
--We see the past at the speed of thought.
--Bars on the windows painted a dark art of lines and space upon every object standing in the path of light streaming into the room.
--Memory, like light, wraps itself around all objects in a room. Each object and item is recording the space-time event from its own perspective.
--The mantle of her consciousness gave way like wax paper walls.
But at times I was just paging through rather than reading with absorption. Part of what gives the story its cool effect are all the quotes, both real and fictional, on various topics--but, paradoxically, some of them are pretty impenetrable, so I just let them give a flavor to the story but didn't read them carefully.
There also isn't a story with a conventional structure here--characters and plot elements are carried over from one section to another, and certain themes and ideas are developed through the overall book, but overall it's more like a collection of meditations on time, memory, and personal and collective history. It's strange: for me the book was simultaneously fascinating and yet hard to stick with and actually read; I admired its imagination but am not sure I enjoyed it all that much. Still, at just $1.99 for the Kindle version, it's worth taking a chance on. You'll get something out of it even if you bounce off parts or can't 100 percent commit to it.
March 7, 2020
An experimental, experiental novel. This story discusses irregularities in time at the particle scale and applies them to our scale to get the reader to think of time as something other than linear. Due to this, there were multiple ways to read the novel. I've started reading another way, and I'll say it's a bit confusing. This book is also a scavenger hunt of literary references and takes a similar approach to the plot - readers aren't outright explained the ending and have to piece it together through various accounts and sources. I thought the writing style was a bit inconsistent. There were moments where I really enjoyed the descriptions and times when they felt threadbare. This story is a collage of scientific information (quantum physics, psychology, and ) and the narrative. It was heavier on the scientific information than I would've liked, and it made some plot lines feel neglected.
May 14, 2014
Certainly more quantum physics than I have ever read willingly, Phillips is an extremely creative story teller. From time travel to trauma, she tackles it all, in this slim but packed volume. Intriguing.
December 13, 2017
ok, so I did skim over some of the long excerpts from "ETO" (the book our main character finds which introduces her to time travel and goes deep into light speculative quantum theory), but I was so enthralled with the plot that I just wanted to get back to it!! I never thought I would enjoy anything so much that quoted Robert Anton Wilson so heavily ;) I am devastated that the sequel has not yet emerged... theres a deep complicated fog amidst the story and the characters, which is what i love, it feels like there is something coming, I want more!! and so cool to read a scifi novel that incorporates post traumatic slave syndrome... anyway I bet next book will be 5 stars
January 3, 2015
This novel is incredible. Recurrence Plot... is a science fiction tour de force that takes the reader on a surreal journey between reality and illusion. I give it an enthusiastic five stars!
September 14, 2020
DNF at 50%. There's a lot of really unique ideas in this book, but it badly needed an editor. The clunky prose and huge stretches of pseudoscientific technobabble could be explained away as an intentional stylistic choice if it weren't obvious from the many typos and misspellings that nobody ever proofread the manuscript.
I've never been attracted to cults or MLMs, but after reading a significant portion of the "Experimental Time Order" chapter/story, I feel like I now understand a bit better how the indoctrination process works: they snow you under with mountains of indigestible word salad, well seasoned with "quantum" this and "astral" that, and all the science just slightly wrong, and eventually your brain gets too tired to stop protesting and just submits and says, "fine. ok. time travel. whatever you say."
Don't get me wrong, I think that harnessing this technique to make the fictional story feel more real is GENIUS, and it's the thing I most admire about Phillips's writing-- but reading it is, in practice, exhausting and not very fulfilling, and that's ultimately why I'm giving up on the book. I admire it as a mind-altering experience, but, like most other mind-altering experiences (intoxicants; staying up all night; spinning around in circles til you can't stand up) I don't actually enjoy it.
I've never been attracted to cults or MLMs, but after reading a significant portion of the "Experimental Time Order" chapter/story, I feel like I now understand a bit better how the indoctrination process works: they snow you under with mountains of indigestible word salad, well seasoned with "quantum" this and "astral" that, and all the science just slightly wrong, and eventually your brain gets too tired to stop protesting and just submits and says, "fine. ok. time travel. whatever you say."
Don't get me wrong, I think that harnessing this technique to make the fictional story feel more real is GENIUS, and it's the thing I most admire about Phillips's writing-- but reading it is, in practice, exhausting and not very fulfilling, and that's ultimately why I'm giving up on the book. I admire it as a mind-altering experience, but, like most other mind-altering experiences (intoxicants; staying up all night; spinning around in circles til you can't stand up) I don't actually enjoy it.
January 28, 2023
Hard to keep the suspension of disbelief, when bombarded with really bad misconceptions of physics. The story was good though
April 20, 2015
Recurrence Plot takes an interesting perspective on time travel which intrigued me. I enjoyed the premise and the set up. It's a little heavy on the technical side, but overall a good read.
January 29, 2017
A bit raw but nevertheless enjoyable.
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May 19, 2017This is some amazing sci-fi. I wish I knew more about science. About 10-15% is some really funky physics and biology stuff. But the story is compelling.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
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