But because nearly anything is possible, gene editing has also been outlawed. Want to build a dragon from crocodile and Komodo genomes? There's a guy in Vegas already working on that - special order for a client, worth millions.

Want to make all malaria-carrying mosquitos be born male so the species dies out and the disease is eradicated? Done. Here, we have a mildly dystopian near-future world where gene editing technology has advanced to a point where nearly anything is possible. In it, he does the dependable science-fiction trick of imagining a future altered by one significant technology and a character significantly impacted by said technology, then mushing the two of them together to see what happens next. They all go off precisely when he wants them to. And on the page, he exudes the smooth, slick confidence of someone who knows exactly where he's going and just how to get there. Crouch's books are fun the way a summer blockbuster is fun. He does disaster and mystery and procedurals that all feel effortless. He can do spec-fic that shades over into near-future sci fi. He spins out grounded, accessible tales with an admirable internal precision no matter the genre. I find the writing process endlessly mysterious and wonderful.Blake Crouch has always been a dependable storyteller. They suddenly clicked together, like puzzle pieces, and I was off and running. While we were in Chicago two years ago, I was pitching each of these ideas to him separately, when it occurred to me they were actually all part of the same story. The novelist Marcus Sakey is one of my good friends, and we always meet up at the inception stage of a new book to pressure-check each other on our ideas. And the last was about a man being hopelessly lost in time. Another involved the idea of meeting yourself. I tried several times to write a version of Dark Matter… getting into SPOILER TERRITORY HERE… Three separate storylines had been teasing me, and I’d tried and failed to write them all separately. I tried several times to write a version of Dark Matter… getting i …more For the last decade, I’ve wanted to write a story that hinges on quantum mechanics. Blake Crouch For the last decade, I’ve wanted to write a story that hinges on quantum mechanics.

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