The Flicker Men (Ted Kosmatka)

A complex, mind-blowing novel about what quantum mechanics is really telling us about the nature of reality. How can observing events change what events happen? Whose observations matter? Will being observed by a bacterium collapse the indeterminate waveform?  How about a cricket, or a garter snake, or a hamster? How about a cat, a monkey, an ape? Is it only humans? Only SOME humans? What if there are humans who qualify as observers, from the point of view of an indeterminate probability waveform, and some who don't? Then the novel goes on from there - how many universes are there? Where do new universes come from? Where does our universe fit into this fractal system? I loved how the ideas built on each other, but confess that as the novel pushed toward its gripping conclusion I started skipping some of the physical ideas and just going for the external plot, and then got lost completely at the very end. Were there different realities the narrator experienced? How was his timeline bent, and was it broken? I guess I'm not quite smart enough, or knowledgeable enough, to stay aboard through the author's train of thought right to the end.