Reddit, or somewhere, told me that I had to read The First 15 Lives of Harry August by Claire North. So I downloaded a copy to my Kindle. And it stayed there for a while. Somewhere along the way, I also downloaded Recursion by Blake Crouch. And about this same time, I kept coming across mentions of Nietzche’s idea that you should live your life so that if you had to live it over again and again forever, you wouldn’t hate it, or worse, be bored or embarassed by it.
And then I started reading Harry August. What a coincidence with that whole Nietzche thing! After Harry dies, he’s immediately reborn back into his original life, but doesn’t start recalling things till he’s about 4 years old. So after just a few lifetimes, he’s learned a whole lot about everthing. And he meets up with other people like himself and discovers their rules. And then whole thing turns into a kind a James Bond thriller.
It was a wild ride, never going where I expected, and it was wonderful.
When I started Recursion, I was apprehensive. I’ve written programs in Prolog. Don’t tell me about recursion. Most people get it all wrong. But that’s not what this is about at all. And here again, folks keep reliving their lives over and again. Another coincidence. Like the previous book, it’s traumatic and surprising. And then it goes James Bond on you again. Sort of. I liked it. Although the two books have a lot of similarities, they are competely different.
In both books the mega-villains are perfectly reasonable in their world-ending intentions. They’re just trying to make their lives worthwhile and meaningful, living up to their mega-abilities. Ultimately the other humans in the world will be better off too. Except things never go to plan, as the mega-villains never seem to realize.
Just because you think you can, that doesn’t mean you should. And maybe the point that Nietzche was trying to make that everybody misses is that anybody who thinks they’re a superman is just a bad human being, broken and twisted and maybe on fire around the edges. I mean, it’s more than OK to be bored or embarassed by your life, if the alternative is massive destruction of everything and everyone all around you. That would actually be even more embarassing, if you were at all capable of being embarassed by such bad behavior or of ever learning from it.
