Dissolution

by Nicholas Binge

The following is nothing but spoilers! This book was decent (B+, I would say), with themes of memory and time travel.

Maggie is in her 80s. She wakes up in a bathtub with a man named Hasan asking her questions. Her husband Stan is in a memory care center with demensia, and Hasan is trying to get information about something Stanley knows. In flashbacks, we get Stanley’s background at a prep school, where he joined a small group studying under one blind teacher who was very into memorizing things and could keep multiple chess games going in his mind.

Anyway, cutting to the chase: the teacher determined that if you remembered something perfectly, it was basically time travel, and you could change the past. And Stanley developed a way of doing this. But if you altered the past, mainly by talking to your own past self, a horrible nothingness (they called it Omega) would come and consume you, causing everyone to forget you ever existed.

Stanley has learned the secret to controlling Omega and turning it off. This involved visiting aboriginal people in Australia, wandering naked through a desert, and burning certain plants (not like that!). Hasan needs to learn this secret, Stanley won’t reveal it (has even erased it from his own mind), and so Hasan is using Maggie to try to get it. Hasan has turned pretty evil at this point, erasing the existence of many people, killing some and destroying their bodies, etc. as part of his experiments to control time and to understand Omega.

Hasan has built a device that lets him relive a loop of time, basically trying it over and over until he gets the outcome he wants. The end of the loop is called “dissolution,” and at that point the loop resumes, and everyone starts over, but Hasan alone remembers what happened in previous loops.

In the course of the book, Maggie gets to see Stan in various times of his life, entering his memories. At the end of the book, when she fully understands, Stan gives her the secret to stopping Omega and leaves it up to her whether she’ll tell Hasan. She decides it’s better to live in this loop – she gets to see Stan without dimensia, she forgets every time (so it’s not boring), and Hasan remembers every time (so it’s a hellish existence for him).