As children, with our lives ahead of us, we wonder ‘what if?’—what if that squirrel could talk, what if I had wings, what if Mommy and Daddy disappeared and I could live in my house all alone and eat dessert any time I wanted. As time passes and the past comes to trail behind we turn this sense of fantasy away from the present back to the past. ‘What if’ becomes ‘what if I had’—moved to Panama, quit smoking, walked away that night, told him I loved him. No child ever wished for a pony half so hard as your average adult wishes to have the chance to rectify an error, supplement a conversation, salvage some lost portion of our lives.
It is no wonder, then, that genre fiction has always been interested in memory—which, after all, has a far closer kinship with fantasy than fact. The Seventh Perfection is a book about a woman with perfect recollection seeking to untangle truth from the twisted strands of history (both personal and societal), and the consequences which spring from this single minded obsession.
Here are five other books likewise fascinated (tormented?) by memory.
Ficciones by Jorge Louis Borges
Any discussion of memory in fantasy needs to start with the Argentinian grandmaster, whose wondrous short stories are widely regarded as among the best written in the 20th century. Ficciones is Borges at the peak of his ability, contemplating the slate of themes to which he would return throughout his life–labyrinths and lost gods, untrue histories, the divergence of recollection, the impossibility of truth. In “Funes the Memorious”, he imagines an illiterate gaucho blessed/cursed with powers of remembrance so extraordinary as to detect and preserve the most minute details of his life–the profile of a dog at 12:13 in the afternoon, the exact placement of every star in the midnight sky. In “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” he chronicles the creation of an imaginary world of enormous peculiarity which begins to enter into and overtake existence. For Borges—for all of us—memory is a force as present and powerful as reality, and often more so.
Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo
A series of objects chronicle an uprising against an unjust regime in this charming, swiftly-paced novella. In the mysterious, evocative recollections of an old washer woman the reader experiences the overthrow of an empire, along with a more intimate depiction of her youth spent in the court of a fallen monarch. As our narrator interweaves her personal experiences as a revolutionary with the sanitized popular accounts of the new regime, we see how memory becomes history, and history becomes myth. Vo has a knack for the small touches which give fantasy its color—her names are fabulous, and throw away references to mammoth-born armies and weather mages are a delight—and the story moves along at a brisk and thrilling pace.
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
In a fantastical version of Medieval Italy, the survivors of a ruined city-state seek the true name of their lost nation to overthrow the (surprisingly sympathetic) dark lord who stole it. Here we see how history—that is, memory on a large scale—can be warped and altered to the benefit of the powerful, with a foreign tyrant not only conquering the eponymous nation but magically eliminating its history from existence. Without a name, without memory to serve as a cohesive identity, the exiled citizens of Tigana become lost and rootless. But Kay is interested in memory on a much finer grain as well, with our cast of anti-heroes (and outright villains) shackled to the events of their lives, struggling to move beyond their tragedies and lost loves.
The Heavens by Sandra Newman
In a halcyon, near magical New York a young woman’s capacity to re-enact history through a dream time existence threatens to corrupt reality. Each morning she wakes to an existence which is a corrupt version of the day before—her friends and family decayed and altered, the world itself coming closer to ruin—in short, a dramatized vision of the entropic reality in which we occupy. The Heavens is a book about the way it felt to be young and vital and beautiful (or at least the way we remember it feeling), and the dangers of committing to a past which never quite existed and which, in any event, can never be recovered. Tragic and luminous, read it but expect to feel sad after.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
No list of this sort could be complete without a mention of Gene Wolfe. But which Gene Wolfe? Peace would certainly deserve a shout out, but I already wrote about that. Book of the New Sun is about memory (and its distortion) most assuredly as it is about magic swords, monsters and magic. But I’ll settle with this novella which is (probably) Wolfe’s finest work, in which a suite of stories detail the colonization of a distant planet in some far future period of humanity’s evolution. In the eponymous short, a demented biotechnologist recollects the twisted attempts of his patriarch to realize a perverse form of immortality, even as his carefully crafted memories omit essential portions of his story. In VRT, an imprisoned anthropologist contemplates an expedition to discover the remnants of an alien species, with the reader forced to untangle which strands of memory have been changed or corrupted. Wolfe’s genius is such that to offer much detail is to render a (potentially false) judgment, but his esoteric examinations of the nebulous boundaries of memory and identity, and of our (inevitably failing) efforts to surmount those limitations, makes for a brilliant if oblique work. Read it, scratch your head confusedly, then read it again.
Buy the Book
The Seventh Perfection
Daniel Polansky’s first book, Low Town, was released in 2011, winning the Prix Imaginales. Two sequels followed, Tomorrow, The Killing (2012) and She Who Waits (2013). His follow up series, The Empty Throne, began with Those Above (2015) and concluded with Those Below (2016). A City Dreaming was released in 2016. His novella, The Builders, was nominated for the 2016 Hugo award. His latest novella, The Seventh Perfection (2020), was featured on Kirkus’s best of 2020 list. He lives in Los Angeles.
And, of course, Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory, wherein the eidetic memory chip in the head of Imperial Security chief Simon Illyan goes haywire…
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.
Darn, The Seventh Perfection sounds fascinating and I’m adding it to my list right now.
I am frequently accused of having an eidetic memory. That’s not quite the case. I’ll grant ‘well above average’, though the coverage is uneven (names and dates stick around easily, faces don’t). I read ‘Funes the Memorious’ for a college class fifteen years ago and it’s stayed with me, for multiple reasons.
Mary E. Pearson’s riveting YA sci-fi mystery The Adoration of Jenna Fox gets into some big questions about memory, though it’s more about apparent amnesia than anything else.
I think Gene Wolfe’s Soldier/Latro novels would have been the best fit for this category. But I’m not mad that Fifth Head of Cerberus got a mention.
Linda Nagata’s Memory where the memories are given physical form by the silver fog that devours and transforms the world each night. The story is driven by a quest for a remembered father and the world’s forgotten past.
“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, the story by Philip K. Dick on which the movie Total Recall was based on, comes to mind…
I remember something about the opening chapters of Nine Princes in Amber….
In Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, the main character, Brutha, has perfect memory. This eventually causes complications in his life.
Great post, sparkling with ideas and insights about memory.
The description of The Heavens reminds me a bit of The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin, a novel that also concerns memory and its relationship to (one extraordinary man’s) reality.
In the YA realm, Rick Riordan”s massively successful Heroes of Olympus series started out in the first two books with each protagonist (Percy Jackson and another) having his memory wiped and having it come back slowly during the course of each book. Memory is central to each plot – at least until Book 3….
I would even go further back and say that Bob Shaw’s slow glass books Light of Other Days and Other Days, Other Eyes, both dealing with glass that can store images and releases them over time, falls into the category of stories about memory.
I quite liked Void Star by Zachary Mason, which has implant-recorded memories as a pretty important driver of the plot.
Overdrawn At the Memory Bank, John Varley short story.
Daniel Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon is riddled with memories, and the effects of memories, as Charley becomes more intelligent and begins to piece together his life before his operation.
The Wolfe is a great pick.
Too bad it isn’t science fiction or fantasy, but À la recherche du temps perdu is the magnum opus.
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi covers a lot of ground around concepts memory and forgetting .
The Architects of Memory by Karen Osborne, the start of the “Memory War” series has the start of some memory related business but I haven’t read the sequel yet which should clarify what exactly is going on in book 1…
The main character in Daniel Polansky’s A City Dreaming has a kind of rolling amnesia due to his status as a near-immortal magician.
Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones. My favorite “Tam Lin” retelling begins with a young woman realizing that she has two separate sets of memories of her childhood. (And sometimes, when I talk with my sister– close in age, grew up in same house with same parents– I think that elfin magic isn’t needed for that to happen.)
And then there’s Octavia Butler and Kindred, which brings up memories that, as a nation, we’d rather forget. And I suppose that, as is the case with Tigana, it suits the powerful that those national memories should be forgotten.
What, 5 books and 18 comments and nobody has mentioned Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh yet?
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine has one theme of transferring people’s memories.
Ficciones by Jorge Louis Borges
Read this book. Then come back for more Borges.
Mem by Bethany Morrow is a a very excellent book about memory and personhood.
I would have gone with Wolfe’s Latro books, but he plays with memory and perception in all his works.
Also, when The Tiger Came Down the Mountain is another book by Nghi Vo is set in the same world as Empress of Salt and Fortune and has the same Scholar but this time they are facing down some tigers. Chih starts telling the story of a scholar and a tiger, but the tigers have a very different version of the story.
One book that sprung to mind immediately was “Nostalgia” by MG Vassanji. One of my favourites!
I loved Recursion by Blake Crouch, which ties in memory to its core theme. Really amazing book!
I thought of the perfect example when I saw the title of this article.
But now, having read it, and this would be way funnier if it wasn’t true and happening to me, I can’t remember what it was…
It’s not what I was thinking of, but Steven Gould’s _Helm_ uses memory in a very interesting way.
You might want to check out The Likely World by Melanie Conroy-Goldman. It’s about a young mother who recovering from an addiction to a fictional drug, cloud. Cloud can remove unpleasant memories. Say you’ve made a mistake and feel terrible about it, a lick of cloud and it’s gone. You feel freed of the burden of the memory and can make a fresh start. Unfortunately, overuse begins to eat away at your long-term memory and becomes addicting.
Mellie the protagonist was a teenager aiming to be a politician when she started on cloud. By the time of the book, she is a single mom with a young child who has learning disabilities caused by her mom’s addiction. Mellie is working on her recovery but can’t remember large parts of her memory including who’s the father of her daughter. The job she had and that is calling her involves finding the right place in videos to insert links that will download some mysterious malware.
It is not an easy read. Mellie is an unreliable narrator because she’s not sure of anything in her memory and the reader is not always sure if a flashback is Mellie remembering, misrembering, or what “actually happened.” The novel opens questions about identity. Who is Mellie if she can’t remember her past.
The Likely World was published by Red Hen Press in August 2020 and is available in local bookstores, Ebooks stores, and of course Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Likely-World-Melanie-Conroy-Goldman/dp/1597098086
Disclaimer: the similarity in our names is not an entire coincidence. The author is my daughter.
You forgot Gene Wolf’s Solider of the Mist. A Roman mercenary in Greece develops antegrade amnesia as punishment from the gods.
These books look great, but I wish there were more sci-fi in this list! I think people leave out the SF in SFF too often :). One of my favorites is MEM by Bethany C. Morrow.