Fascinating but uneven for me and the science info dumps both slowed things down & lost me once too often. Probably a better read for someone more science literate than me. ( )

On the back cover Hugh Howey, author of the "Wool" series says, "If Stephen Hawking and Stephen King wrote a novel together, you'd get Flicker Man"; I couldn't agree more. It's brilliant, disturbing and well thought out and has you question the Universe and where we fit in. We don't really learn who the "Flicker Men" are until late in the book, though once we do, its off to the races at a Le Mans pace! Ted's grasp of science is far beyond most which force feeds the reader into learning something new; a good thing at any measure. His ability to catch the reader off guard, ramp up the speed and throw curve balls along the way is the mark of a great storyteller! ( )

I just couldn't stop reading this book. Quantum physics lover or not, it makes you think about life. ( )

heard as audiobook. The short sentences in places helped drive the urgency of events, contrary to the irritation felt by a previous reviewer of the written version.
Started out slow, as we are introduced to a character who seems to be a loser: drinks too much, lost his last job (reason not told until later). He's being given a last chance at a job by a college friend. It turns interesting section as he gets acquainted with co-workers. There's an awful lot of physics theory involved in the storyline development, as our guy is a genius. His experiment is world-changing: apparently his machine shows quantum theory is affected by observation--but only by some people. A megachurch preacher hears about it & wants to test pregnant women to show unborn babies have a soul. The answer is disconcerting: apparently some people don't have souls. I liked how he led into this with reference to "cryptic species", an actual concept meaning sometimes you can't distinguish between species based on physical appearance, but these are real differences which can be detected other ways. The analogy breaks down when he asserts that the trait doesn't follow any inherited pattern.
The novel turns into an action/adventure tale starting when our guy tries to figure out what happened to a co-worker who disappeared. He's amazingly athletic for someone who's spent 8 years just drinking....oh, yeah, he's also younger than people expect for his level of physics ability. He gets "lectured" to a lot by a) Brighton, probably a "bad guy" who is first trying to get him on his team, and b) others who've been hunting down his pursuers for a long time. They give an "alternate worlds" explanation which he can't quite grasp, until he finally sees a pursuer's true form, and then when he *lightbulb* understands the math behind how it works.
While a lot of what happens toward the end can't be examined too closely for being logical, the ending does fit in nicely with the logic. I might not like it, but it makes sense.
A lot of the physics sections I just let pass over my head as so much gobbledygook, & didn't really matter for the story development.
All in all, one of the weirder science fiction books, which is saying a lot for a field which is trademarked by being different. ( )

I’ve read several short stories by Kosmatka and was impressed by them, but none of the blurbs to his novels – three to date, of which this is the last – made them sound as if they would appeal to the same extent. But then I started reading The Flicker Men and discovered that its plot was based on the Kosmatka story I’d admired the most. Except. How to…? Okay. There was was this one story in which Feynman’s double slit experiment revealed there were some people who could not collapse the wave function and so were not sentient as such. The Flicker Men takes that premise and runs with it. First, it posits a televangelist using it to prove that foetuses have “souls”, but then it turns out there are people from an alternate reality on Earth who are trying to shut down the experiment… and the novel turns into a somewhat implausible technothriller with the hero constantly on the run. I was… disappointed. The short story is excellent, but this expansion of it reads like it was handed to Tom Clancy as a premise. Okay, Kosmatka is a better writer than Clancy – but this is definitely more like Clancy’s output than the high concept sf I was expecting. Disappointing. ( )