The Fold (2015)
The Fold is a 2015 fiction book written by Peter Clines.
A high school teacher with a perfect, unforgiving memory gets pulled back into the world he left behind. Mike Erikson forgets nothing, and an old friend at DARPA wants that gift aimed at a secret project in the California desert: the Albuquerque Door, a machine that folds space so a person can step across a room, or across the country, in a single stride. The team insists it works flawlessly. Mike keeps noticing the small wrongnesses they have trained themselves not to see. Peter Clines builds a tight science-fiction thriller out of a simple, chilling question about what such a door might quietly let through.
Quick answers
What is The Fold about?
A high school teacher with a perfect, unforgiving memory gets pulled back into the world he left behind. Mike Erikson forgets nothing, and an old friend at DARPA wants that gift aimed at a secret project in the California desert: the Albuquerque Door, a machine that folds space so a person can step across a room, or across the country, in a single stride. The team insists it works flawlessly. Mike keeps noticing the small wrongnesses they have trained themselves not to see. Peter Clines builds a tight science-fiction thriller out of a simple, chilling question about what such a door might quietly let through.
When was The Fold published?
The Fold was published in 2015.
Who made The Fold?
The Fold was written by Peter Clines.
Similar books
The Fold in our writing
- Companion guide: Cosmic Horror
A few thoughts on The Fold
Fans of the creeping dread here should watch Stranger Things, which mines the same territory of a government lab, a rip in space, and something coming through it. The film Coherence delivers a similar slow-tightening science puzzle among ordinary people. For interactive unease built on a teleportation device with a dark cost, try the game Half-Life, whose Resonance Cascade is the same idea run to catastrophe.
Secret facilities running an experiment everyone insists is flawless
Peter Clines builds The Fold around a DARPA door that everyone insists works flawlessly, and a hero who cannot stop noticing what the rest of the team has trained itself to ignore. Half-Life and Stranger Things share that same secret-facility dread, Crichton's paired Andromeda Strain and Terminal Man run on the same government-lab hubris, and Recursion follows its own too-perfect device toward a similar reckoning.
Ordinary reality quietly breaking at the seams
Mike Erikson keeps noticing the small wrongness in a door that is supposed to work perfectly, and that same creeping unease runs through Coherence and Code 46, where ordinary reality quietly stops behaving as it should. Ted Chiang's The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate and Peter F. Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction push the same idea further, letting one doorway or fracture unravel everything around it.