The Fold, by Peter Clines

I listened to The Fold recently, and while the premise was promising at the start, it ended up being more frustrating and annoying than enjoyable for me.

Our story starts with the protagonist, Mike Ericson, high-school teacher, getting a request from his old friend at DARPA to do a special top secret task. Why would a high-school teacher be needed for this, you ask? Well, it turns out Mike has an eidedic memory, meaning (in the novel, anyway, this has never been demonstrated in real life) that he can recall anything he’s ever seen or read with perfect clarity. Why is someone with this super-power like ability working as a highschool teacher? Because he’s a Mary Sue. More on this later.

Mike’s friend Reggie has been trying to get Mike to work for him for a decade, but due to Mike’s Mary Sue-ness, he refuses to take any job or do anything with his powers. This time though, he agrees to take a look at the project, because Reggie’s level of secrecy intrigues him. Mike finds out that his job is to investigate ‘the project’, whatever that is, and use his super mental abilities to decide of it’s worth continuing to fund the project.

When Mike gets to the meeting they’re having, he finds out that the project is run by a group of scientists who are trying to teleport matter. And here is where I first knew I was in for trouble.

The scientists go on to describe their many failed attempts at teleporting matter, leading to the eye-rolling of our protagonist and him whispering things to Reggie like (paraphrasing) “You brought me here for teleportation? Of course it failed, are you an idiot?” This sounds like a reasonable way to react. Except.

The teleporter didn’t fail.

This is what the scientists considered failure: They teleported some test blocks, which disintegrated to dust immediately after coming out the other side. They also teleported a dog, which came out the other end inside-out and dead.

Yes, you read that right. They successfully teleported matter, and consider it a failure worth abandoning the project over. As does every government, business, or military entity in this meeting.

What???

I actually had to go back and re-listen to that part before writing this to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding something. But nope, it’s right there. The team of scientists seeking funding for their project successfully teleported matter three separate times and consider this a failure, as does everyone in the room.

Can you imagine what world these people live in where they are not instantly having money shoveled toward them? Where the government isn’t locking down everything until the technology is perfected? Who cares if the matter ‘crumbles to dust’? If you can actually teleport instantly even one atom, you’ve just invented instantaneous communication.

Anyway, the scientists describe how they’ve moved on to another project, where instead of teleporting, they make a portal through space-time between two locations. A door that can be stepped through. They use the tired analogy of folding a piece of paper to shorten the distance between two points to explain how it works.

And, this door actually works. You can step through one end, and come out the other side in another room a kilometer away. Yet they are still somehow worried about money, and people are still hesitant to fund them. I don’t know what world this book is based in anymore.

But anyway! Mike observes with his video recorder eyes and so on and there is a bunch of filler and slow lead-up to

SPOILERS START HERE:

us eventually learning that the portal isn’t actually leading to another room, but to another universe where things are mostly the same, but little details like someone’s hair being a different color or your office being on the opposite side of the hall start cropping up. People think they are having memory problems at first, but in reality once you’ve gone through the portal you’re in a different universe, and who knows what could be different about the world and your life.

This is a really cool and interesting concept. I started to suspect why the author gave Mike his super memory power–so he’d be able to tell when he’s in a different universe. All kinds of creepy things could happen. It would be unsettling to never know which details of your life were real anymore once you stepped through the door. Your closest friends might not recognize you, or be just slightly off in strange or surreal ways, plus there is the philosophical weirdness of, say, your wife not really being your wife (who am I really sleeping with?).

Except it never went that direction. Mike never goes through the doorway himself until the very end, and it’s never hinted at that he may have ended up in a universe that is not his own. The other characters change from going through the door, but it’s never a major plot point except to make one of the woman scientists sleep with Mike. She was cold, and now she’s screwing him, what a twist! But our Mary Sue has to get laid.

We also find out that the reason Mike is a school teacher instead of doing literally anything he wants to, is because he wants to ‘be normal.’ This is gotten across in the most patronizing way. He never reads books because he’ll remember everything and become too smart. He purposefully ‘kept himself dumb’ so he could have an easier time interacting with all the ‘normal’ people around him. It’s the ‘tortured super hero whose gift is really a curse’ trope, and it makes you role your eyes so hard it hurts.  He comes across as an asshole throughout the book, too, and is read that way by the narrator very clearly. Is it some huge temptation for authors to make their leads arrogant dicks, or what?

So Mike has all the benefits of perfect memory, and none of the downsides of being unable to interact with people normally. The only problem he has at all are his ‘quirks’ which the other characters find annoying, such as rattling of strings of facts that aren’t related to anything. That’s supposed to be his fault, I guess.

Anyway, the main concept of a door leading to other parallel universes that you get stuck in because the odds of you ever returning to your own world are so small with an infinity of universes–it’s a pretty cool concept. A lot could be done with it. But can you guess what the climax of the story is? Think of the least interesting thing you could do with the concept of a portal to parallel universes…

The door opens into a bad universe with bug monsters who come through, and the heroes shoot the monsters with guns and then have to blow up the door with bombs.

Yep. That’s the climax. Fighting ‘bug men’ who make clicking sounds like the predator. (why do aliens always make clicking sounds these days?)

There’s not much else to say about that.

It seems clear that the author is a thriller writer, and not a sci-fi writer. He went to great pains to avoid even trying to explain the science of anything, which is fine, I’ve done the same in my own work. But, some of it is just too ridiculous to accept.

We find out toward the end of the story that the scientists don’t actually understand how the door works. They just built the thing, turned it on and it worked, and they’ve been spending the intervening years trying to figure out why it is actually working at all. I liked this idea, and was thinking it was going to turn out that the machine didn’t actually work at all in their universe, but that someone had built the door in an alternate universe where it DID work, and that door had opened into the universe we’re all familiar with.

But it turns out that the scientists had input some formula from a mysterious old book written by a Victorian mad scientist, and this formula from the 1800’s is what made the door work. What?

Sigh.

END SPOILERS.

I don’t usually rant this long about any books or movies, but this one was just so close to being interesting and good, and kept letting me down, so I guess it had a bit of an effect on me.

It’s clear the author knows how to write a page turner, so I wouldn’t be surprised if his other non-sci-fi books were great. But this one was quite frustrating to read.

I would not recommend it to well versed sci-fi fans. If you just want an exciting thriller and don’t really care if things make sense, then you may enjoy it.