"The Flicker Men" is a 2015 science-fiction novel by Ted Kosmatka. Kosmatka had previously written two other novels, and several science-fiction stories, as well as some literary fiction. The book takes place in a contemporary setting, and has aspects of literary fiction, science-fiction, and spy/crime fiction.
The book begins with our protagonist, Eric Argus, getting a new job. Eric Argus is a famed theoretical physicist, who, due to alluded-to problems in his past (including alcoholism), has been out of his field for a while. However, an old friend of his is willing to take a chance on him, so he gets a job at a think tank. Pressed to find something to research, he goes back to his old field of quantum entanglement and the double slit experiment. The science-fiction core of the novel is that he discovers that only humans have the ability to "collapse the probability wave"...and then furthermore, discovers that not all humans have the ability to do so. This revelation shakes some powerful people and reveals a conspiracy, with Argus being forced to flee from exploded warehouses and into abandoned factories as a shadowy group with a mysterious agenda pursues him.
For me, this book started with the feeling of literary fiction: a story of a contemporary person overcoming psychological and social difficulties. It then proceeded to become more of a science-fiction novel. The concept of quantum entanglement, and quantum physics in general, is often entry level stoner epistemology, and by the time this book was written, the mind-blowing aspects of quantum physics were already old news. And yet, when they were discussed in the book, I believed in it. It seemed real. The book then proceeds to a long section that is more of an action/spy novel, and one that I felt I had read before. There is actually a section where the leader of the shadowy conspiracy captures the hero and tells him their plans, interspersed with portentous, but mysterious statements and philosophical debate. After running and fighting and waking up from a number of concussions, and then finding out the mysterious nature of the multiverse, Argus awakes to find himself in...pretty much the same place he started, but a little wiser. As a reader, I found myself not really clarified, in terms of society or physics, by the conclusion.
But here is what I took away from this book, perhaps unfairly. This book was written in 2015, which for me, was a long time ago. This book was written at the very tail end of the 1990s: it was about a settled world, where one unexplainable factor starts unraveling things. The literary fiction of the book is about an unsettled person trying to fit into an institutional world: the alcoholic, troubled Argus comes to the safe, comfortable, institutional halls of a think tank. The science-fiction core of the book is about the unsettled fact of quantum entanglement challenging common-sense reality. Eric Argus, and quantum physics, are both things that can not be reconciled with the predominant reality, and this is what sets the books action in motion. And this is where, although only five years of age, the book is dated. This book takes place in the Fukuyama "End of History": reality and institutions are settled, and there are only a few trouble spots poking through. In 2020, the threat to consensual reality comes not from the possibility of esoteric, highly technical problems in quantum physics, but of an open-ended decision by large segments of the public that truth and reality are mutable concepts to be abused for fun. Institutions have either failed, or committed surrender, in the face of the new paradigm of reality-denying. The central concept of "The Flicker Men", while an interesting take in the year 2015, is dated by the standards of 2020 reality.