Again and again, I find myself returning to stories about memories—their twisting, reconstructive nature fascinates me. When the scientific literature on the subject offers such intriguing tales as those of Patient H.M., who after a surgery could not form new memories, or of Solomon Shereshevsky, who had an “unlimited” memory, writers of fiction have to work that much harder to find new ways to make this cognitive process even more thrilling, moving, and enchanting. Stories that explore questions of memory, identity, and personhood are especially alluring—what are we without our memories? How do we preserve them, if they define us? What method of preservation should we use? And what happens when we treat memory like an entity to manipulate? Here are some stories that consider these questions, and examine their implications…
“Across the River, My Heart, My Memory” by Ann LeBlanc
I had never expected to read a story narrated by the pancreas of a woman, now dead, which had been given to Michelle, who’s dead too. As it gets placed into yet another body, the pancreas tries to talk to the other organs. It wants to keep Michelle alive, and it has new ways of doing so.
The combination of technology and medicine LeBlanc describes here is both fascinating and a bit frightening, and offers two perspectives on how people can live on even after their deaths. I’ve never read anything like this.
“The Memory Who Became a Girl” by Jennifer Campbell-Hicks
Instead of ashes, people send their loved ones’ memories into space, stored in chips packed inside boxes. One of these boxes contains the memory of a six-year-old girl who died of a genetic defect. When Evan finds her, she stops being a collection of memories and gains consciousness. The two kids find in each other an escape from their loneliness. But as time passes and Evan grows up, the girl—Angel, as he’d named her—is forgotten. She waits, however, confident that her friend will return. For even though she may look like a girl, she has grown up. And she misses Evan very much. But will he remember to come back, or will Angel have to wait for eternity?
“The 207th Time I Went Back to March 9, 1980” by Beth Cato
Few things are more painful than watching a loved one slowly lose themselves to a physical sickness or the effects of dementia or Alzheimer’s. Memories are slippery, forever changing even as some are frozen in time, immune to modifications. But what if those memories start fading away too? Our narrator doesn’t want to let that happen, so they’re going back in time to preserve the best day of her mother’s life.
“And Now the Shade” by Rich Larson
Minerva’s grandmother no longer lives in the present. With her age, her health and mind have withered. Every digivisit is the same, an unwritten script that Minerva has memorised. Her worries about her grandmother make it difficult to focus on her work, designing plants that will grow in a world that keeps getting hotter. It feels as if her abuela has been replaced with a deepfake. As her grief and work frustration reach a peak, Minerva finds herself breaking the “script” and everything comes spilling out. When she’s done, her grandmother tells her a story, one that she’s never told before—a story that ends up being much more than a tale from the past for Minerva.
“Certainty in Gold” by Samara Auman
Inspired by their mothers, who worked in science, childhood friends Hibiki and Renata end up on a Mars mission. The job matches their passions, but Renata finds Mars bleak and boring compared to the green of the trees they climbed as children, the blue of the roaring sea. When Hibiki is diagnosed with cancer, she decides she wants to do something for her friend. They can’t go back to Earth, so Hibiki uses a Doppel—a robot connected to a chip in your head that can let you experience any part of the world—and starts collecting everything that’s beautiful, in order to give Renata the world she misses so much, capturing the way they once experienced it together.
“A Memory Inscribed at the Time of the Rising Seas” by S.L. Harris
I love reading sweeping, immersive novellas and novelettes, but there’s something nice and neat about smaller stories about little encounters, like Ko the merman meeting shark-eyed Amarie while inscribing on roots all that he knows (including this encounter), so that it may be preserved after he’s gone. In other words, stories that capture life as it happens, for the meeting of two people who stop and lend an ear to each other are just as noteworthy and deserving of our consideration as any king’s battle victories and the legacies of great thinkers.