Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch

Interesting novel, but there are a few elements I wish had been included:

The box: We don’t need to know how the box works, but I wouldn’t mind a little pseudoscience to explain where it gets the energy from.

And apparently it manifests in whatever world those inside the box opens the door into, and once it’s there, it doesn’t go away. Remember the version of Jason that shows up in someone’s basement. That person takes the mind altering substance, walks into the box and disappears forever. Then the other Jason enters the box when the other person is gone. Does it simply manifest out of thin air whenever the door is opened? And is it always in the same location in the other world? Then it should sometimes be buried underground, and even manifest in air above ground before it lands hard. And what happens if someones destroys the box from the outside in one of the worlds? Since it is the same box, does it get destroyed in all the other universes too? Or what if someone throws a bomb into the open door?

If it is you state of mind that decide where you ends up, why the long and never-ending corridor, and the long walks in it? Just focus on where you want to go, and open the nearest door. No need to walk for a whole hour.

Amanda: In some timelines she dies, and the version of her that traveled with the narrator left him before he found back home. But there should be other versions that both survived and was still with him when he finally found his version of Chicago. But there are no Amandas, just endless Jasons. Find it weird to think that every single Amanda either died or left him before he succeeded.

Both Daniela, Charlie and Jason 2 would have made countless choices since Jason 1 was kidnapped. So there should be countless versions of the “right” Chicago to return to. Wouldn’t there be at least a few versions where no Jasons comes back from another timeline? Why not try to find one of those when the world you arrive in is crowded with Jasons? Just concentrate and imagine a timeline where no other Jasons have returned from the other world.

When they realize they are running out of both money and the mind altering chemical compound that Ryan made for Velocity Laboratories, why don’t they go back to Velocity Laboratories? Not the same they left, but a version where everybody are dead or gone because of an incident similar to the one where whole Chicago was dying because of some deadly disease? Inside such an empty building they could grab enough backpacks for a long time, and should they run out of it, return for more. Of course that would make the book too long, but at least they could have played with the idea.

Jason and Daniela decided to let Charlie choose where to go. So what if one of the other Jasons go into the box and focus really hard while telling himself: “I want to go to the world where my wife, son and the other me ended up after they entered the box”.

Then there are the various worlds. In some all humans are gone because of some disaster, and in another Chicago has fallen victim for an ice age. It doesn’t matter what choices humans do, it will not cause Yellowstone to explode as a super-volcano or make an asteroid crash into the planet in some timelines, but not in others.Which is the reason why I don’t think we’re actually dealing with a branching timeline, where the timeline branch every time someone makes a choice (and with several billion humans on the planet, in addition to countless animals, is all the time). Instead we’re dealing with countless parallell universes, where all are identical, or almost identical, to the one we live in, but which at some point diverge from one another when someone finally makes a choice that differ from the other worlds that have so far been identical. And in some of these worlds there are asteroids that will crash into the planet or a new ice age that occurs no matter what humans decide. So when you step out of the box, you will see a dead world covered in ash, or snow and ice, or forests. Or maybe even lava. In one scene of the book, Jason thinks about a never ending eternity, and when he opens the door, all he sees is total blackness and emptiness. He could have been inside an underground bunker, or something far more disturbing.
It makes me think of The Tyranny of the Butterfly, by Frank Schätzing (even if he made a big error in the novel, which I will not spoil here).

One thing I also wished had been included in the novel; someone else than Daniela and Charlie realize there are many versions of Jason in Chicago. There is the girl behind the bar who thinks they are twins or something. And the women Jason wants to buy a gun from, but she thinks he is just the same person visiting the store several times. A scene where some random persons sees a dozen Jasons or so would have been interesting.

Can a decent man really turn into a cold hearted murderer in just a few weeks, like some of the other versions of Jason turned out to be?

And why did Jason2 shoot the Jason that was about to kill main Jason when he meant to kill him himself seconds later? Why not just stand there and wait, watching him being stabbed to death, and then kill the other one? That would obviously have made a bad ending, but one has to wonder what Jason2 was thinking.

Not sure about the message of the novel. Does it mean talented people needs to decide if they want a family and sacrifice a promising career, or go for the latter and live as singles for the rest of their life? Why not both? And sometimes people end up where they are in life not by choice, but because of something in their life they can’t control.

by Tidemand