Recursion

Crouch, Blake. Recursion. NYC: Crown, 2019. See Internet Speculative Fiction Database at link for a German translation, reprints, and distinction from other works titled "Recursion."[1]

Reviewed by Lauren Crawford, SFRA Review #330 (Fall 2019): pp. 188-90.[2]

After the technology of time travel is harnessed and commodified, a select few can pay for the opportunity to journey backward, to recast their past decisions, or to act with the benefit of foreknowledge. But this technology, far from being a benign product, conjures apocalypse—multiplied apocalypse—that loops, twists, dies, and begins anew, ad infinitum. [...]

[... In one] new past [... a] scientist and researcher [...], with funding from billionaire Marcus Slade, constructs a “memory chair” designed to record memories to improve prognosis and quality-of-life for Alzheimer’s patients. But Slade pushes the technology past the point of medical intervention, opting instead to create “pure-heroin ... memory reactivation” (53), a totally immersive, entertaining memory re-experience. (Crawford, p. 188)

The chair is later upgraded to a sensory "deprivation tank" — and things get complicated and, as often in time-travel stories, paradoxical (plus, here apocalyptic).

Crawford calls attention to similarities in memory issues with Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (p. 189); in terms of this wiki, cf. and contrast in Lathe (and the PBS LATHE) the image of a person in a high-tech chair or chamber having a brain messed with. We'll add also that the 1983 BRAINSTORM may also have some parallels — but that may be a stretch.

RDE, finishing, 20Oct21