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Reminds me of an old Kim Stanley Robinson SF novel called Icehenge, which as I remember it revolves around life extension without corresponding memory preservat
by mrec 10y ago
Reminds me of an old Kim Stanley Robinson SF novel called Icehenge, which as I remember it revolves around life extension without corresponding memory preservation, so that history becomes a way of understanding your own past. I think it did interesting things with the unreliable-narrator trope and the idea of historical revisionism.
Definitely recommended, and I'm feeling a strong urge to dig it out and reread it; it's been decades. It'd be pleasingly appropriate to discover that I'm misremembering or have a drastically different response to it this time.
- clort 10y agoYou might also like 'Soldier in the Mist' by Gene Wolfe, about a greek soldier who loses his short term memory from an injury. He starts each day by reading the journal he finds beside his bed..
- mrec 10y agoI tried that not long after reading Icehenge, but didn't really get on with it. Again, that was decades ago, so maybe I should give it another look. Gene Wolfe does tend to reward older readers; I'm pretty sure most of his Urth books whooshed right over my head as a teenager.
- ekianjo 10y agokind of like the movie Memento?
- FreezerburnV 10y agoYou might also give "Dancing With Eternity" a try by John Patrick Lowrie. It has a similar idea, but instead of total memory loss it's selective, and an individual can choose what they keep. I'm not done with it yet, but it does have some very interesting ideas and musings about what happens when death stops being a factor in life, or what if the process were more expensive than most could afford.
- danneu 10y agoI can imagine a (tragic?) sci-fi love story where a once-couple meets again thousands of years in the future. One of them opted to keep their memories of the other on every reincarnation all those millennia, but the other didn't.