Speculative fiction that deals with memory

January 24, 2022 7:53 AM

Looking for recommendations for science fiction, fantasy, magical stories that explore memory in any way. Especially anything that might present some new or weird way of thinking about memory.
posted by latkes to Media & Arts (55 answers total)

A Memory Called Empire! It’s so apt for this question that I have to wonder if reading it was the prompt.
posted by chocotaco at 7:57 AM on January 24, 2022 [10 favorites]

If you're open to movies in addition to written works, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:57 AM on January 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

"Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang (adapted for the screen as "Arrival") deals with this as "memories of future events"
posted by alchemist at 7:59 AM on January 24, 2022 [14 favorites]

The upcoming Severance on Apple TV deals with "severing" work and home memories.
posted by genrand at 8:03 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City might be worth a try. (It includes lots of violence and people behaving badly.) The author's other stuff in the same Revelation Space universe - especially the Pattern Jugglers bits in the first few - might also be of interest, but it's a tertiary plot line in a much bigger story.

"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" is classic, but I personally found it disappointing.
posted by eotvos at 8:08 AM on January 24, 2022

Another Ted Chiang: “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”
posted by supercres at 8:10 AM on January 24, 2022 [11 favorites]

This is a frequent theme in PKD's works, but some that come to mind in particular are:

- Ubik
- We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (basis for Total Recall)
- Paycheck
posted by adamrice at 8:12 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yoko Ogawa, "The Memory Police"
posted by Jeanne at 8:13 AM on January 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

1. A heist novel about living on Mars, the impact of technology on memory, access to your past as an issue of privacy and vulnerability, and a lot of lasers and space ships and cool stuff. Beautifully written. The Quantum Thief.

2. The City and the City. A police mystery about thought crime, ruling classes, and the little contradictions we all swallow to make society grind forward. A modern classic.
posted by StoicRomance at 8:17 AM on January 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

Borges' " Funes The Memorious"
posted by thelonius at 8:18 AM on January 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

Peter Watts, "Starfish"
posted by Eddie Mars at 8:19 AM on January 24, 2022

Memento (? - not sure if it qualifies)
Minority report (ditto)
posted by Erinaceus europaeus at 8:22 AM on January 24, 2022

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant.
posted by Beverley Westwood at 8:30 AM on January 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

The upcoming Severance on Apple TV deals with "severing" work and home memories.

I got briefly excited by the idea that this might be an adaptation of Ling Ma's novel Severance! Looks like no, but Severance the novel also deals with memory: its zombie figures compulsively act out behaviors that they're accustomed to (and are, in this, only slightly distinguishable from its non-zombie characters).

Jennifer Egan's The Candy House, out April 5, will also fit the bill: it involves a tech company that offers "externalized memory," where you can download and access your entire memory and the memories of others (yes it's as chilling as that sounds).
posted by babelfish at 8:31 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's a piece of 100 Years of Solitude where insomnia leads to amnesia; and it's somehow tied to candy IIRC? But that might be cheating---there's a piece of 100 Years of Solitude for every piece of human experience.
posted by adekllny at 8:38 AM on January 24, 2022

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, first in a series.
posted by jimw at 8:43 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Flowers for Algernon," both the short-story and novel versions. What exactly is rememberable? (Huge content warning for ableism.)

Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series also approaches questions of memory and cognition from a cyborg-ish/multiple-sentient-brains-plus-AI point of view.
posted by humbug at 9:07 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Nick Harkaway's Gnomon is about a lot of things, but also memory.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:08 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, sort of.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:12 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Gene Wolfe - this is a big theme in several of his books. In Book of the New Sun the protagonist, Severian, claims to have a perfect memory. Conversely in Soldier of the Mist, Latro is an ancient Greek soldier who loses his memory every night after being wounded/cursed, and writes a scroll to recall the days events. Oh and he can see the Gods because of his injury.
posted by crocomancer at 9:21 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe Of Heaven is primarily about dreams, but in this story they have a significant effect on memory.
posted by Ookseer at 9:40 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Solaris
(Get the newer, direct-to-English translation, not the earlier Polish to French to English one.)

An alien planet communicates with the research scientists stationed there by making their memories corporeal.
posted by phunniemee at 9:43 AM on January 24, 2022

Oh and since there have been several PKD recs in this thread: skip the source material, go straight to the movies. Don't even feel bad for a second. The movies are where it's at. (Minority Report is an excellent movie, even if it stars he who must not be named. The short story it's based on is wow just truly awful.)

Allow me to amend from an above comment:
[Any PKD story] is classic, but I personally found it disappointing.
posted by phunniemee at 9:48 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

A Memory Called Empire first book of Arkady Martine's Teixcalaanl series is really great and memory is a major feature.
posted by supermedusa at 9:59 AM on January 24, 2022

Piranesi! Memory loss as architecture, journalling, and words forming worlds. Beautiful strange book written by a chronically ill author.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:01 AM on January 24, 2022 [17 favorites]

Recursion by Blake Crouch is blurbed as "a breath-taking exploration of memory and what it means to be human". Can confirm, blurb is correct.
posted by guessthis at 10:07 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Lathe of Heaven tells the story of a person whose dreams alter reality. It involves memory to the extent that the protagonist remembers what things were like previously, but no one else in the world perceives that anything has changed.

And a tv/movie recommendation because it is great: Black Mirror, Season 1, Episode 3, "The Entire History of You" explores the repercussions of having HD access to everything you've previously experienced.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 10:12 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

A few short stories I posted in an FPP a while back: Three recent SF/F short stories about memories lost and found by Eleanor Pearson, Bo Balder, and Hal Y. Zhang.

Greg Egan's story "Closer" has a moment where it reflects on memory and personality. His story "TAP" is about being able to communicate whole experiences--a "total affect protocol"--presumably including memories.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:29 AM on January 24, 2022

A second vote for Memory Police mentioned above; we just read it for my book club. It's set on an isolated island in Japan, where people have been gradually just sort of "forgetting" different things; but it's more like, they wake up one morning and go out to the kitchen and when they look at their toaster, they're all "what the hell is that thing?" and don't know what it is any more. And then when that happens they have to take the whatever-it-is to The Memory Police to be destroyed. These kinds of "disappearing objects" happen to everyone on the island in one fell swoop each time - except for with a rare few people who seem to still remember everything that has "disappeared" in this way, and gradually are treated as criminals by The Memory Police.

It's pretty funky - the main narrator is a writer living on the island, who decides to hide her editor - one of the people who still can remember things - in her attic.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:30 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh and The Giver is an excellent child-appropriate piece for this topic that still stands up for adults.
posted by phunniemee at 10:49 AM on January 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Another vote for Borges's Funes the Memorious, which is a remarkable literary thought experiment: what would it be like to remember absolutely everything that happened to oneself, with no ability to forget? And since it is a Borges story, it is far more than that bare description suggests, deeply layered and inimitably styled.
posted by Creosote at 10:52 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

And a tv/movie recommendation

There was a movie of Lathe! I think made for PBS.
posted by thelonius at 11:15 AM on January 24, 2022

what would it be like to remember absolutely everything that happened to oneself, with no ability to forget?

Oh, wow, I'll third Borges, but this synopsis reminded me of one of my very favorite Weird Tales from the 20th Century, Zinaida Gippius's 1906 short story "Fate," which is about a woman who can remember absolutely everything that's going to happen to her in the future. Gippius's story struck me as allegorical for women at the time having fewer ways to imagine their lives unfolding, but it was also just super well-written. Here's her biographical sketch at Queer Portraits in History.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:16 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Trading Rosemary, by Octavia Cade.

In a world where experience is currency, Rosemary is the owner of a very special library—a library of memory, where scented coins transfer personal experience from one individual to another. When she trades away the sole memory of her grandmother's final concerto, family opposition, in the form of her daughter Ruth, forces Rosemary to go on a quest to try and recover the lost coin. Yet having to trade away her own memories to get it back, how much of Rosemary will survive the exchange?
posted by gideonfrog at 11:21 AM on January 24, 2022

Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren.
posted by goatdog at 11:23 AM on January 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

I like these kinds of books. My recommendations:

2nding Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Subdivision by J. Robert Lennon - nameless woman can't remember what led her to wind up in a guesthouse in an unusual subdivision
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh -- nameless woman abuses drugs to sleep; memory problems ensue
Remainder by Tom McCarthy -- nameless man gets hit on the head and keep reconstructing and re-enacting vague memories (Remainder is one of my top 5 favorite books, ever)
posted by jabes at 11:51 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite SF novellas (unfortunately not as well-known as I think it should be) is The Albertine Notes by Rick Moody. It's collected in his book Right Livelihoods as well as in this McSweeney's genre fiction anthology. It's a beautiful, hallucinatory, Proustian story about a devastated Manhattan in the wake of a dirty bomb. The story follows a journalist as he investigates a new street drug called Albertine that allows its users to access their own memories in strange and terrifying ways.

A detailed and spoiler-filled review can be found here, but I recommend reading it first with as little preparation as possible.
posted by ourobouros at 11:53 AM on January 24, 2022

Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead [no paywall for me in Chrome's Incognito mode]. That's the short story version; he expanded it into a novel, which I don't feel is as strong.
posted by jocelmeow at 12:11 PM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

What the Heart Remembers
I wasn't expecting it to be so engaging....
" Eden is convinced that her new heart carries the memories of its original owner."
posted by mightshould at 1:13 PM on January 24, 2022

My Real Children by Jo Walton
posted by cheesegrater at 1:19 PM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

thelonius: "There was a movie of Lathe! I think made for PBS."

I believe Lathe! was Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical adaptation.

Seriously, there was a PBS adaptation and another adaptation.
posted by adamrice at 1:28 PM on January 24, 2022

Seconding Severance (the book by Ling Ma), The Lathe of Heaven, and The Brief History of the Dead -- literally just finished reading Severance like half an hour ago and didn't want it to ever end.
posted by cabbage raccoon at 1:34 PM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

You Feel It Just Below the Ribs by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson
posted by aaebig at 2:20 PM on January 24, 2022

n'thing Severance, Lathe of Heaven, Dhalgren and the Memory Police.

Gun, with Occasional Music is the one that I'm shocked hasn't been mentioned yet -- memory becomes taboo, plus it's just excellent.

Before Mars is also a good example if you're up for a locked room mystery - sci-fi combo. I really enjoyed the whole Planetfall series but not all of them meet your criteria.
posted by snaw at 2:55 PM on January 24, 2022

Karin Tidbeck's The Memory Theater scratches this itch well, if not in a very weird way (I loved it).

Also, following up on WCityMike2's comment, I just watched Johnny Mnemonic on the weekend and definitely fits the bill from a cyberpunk angle (e.g. equating human memory to computer memory). It's not great though, and I haven't read the William Gibson story it's based on (although he also did the screenplay).
posted by Paper rabies at 3:29 PM on January 24, 2022

Lots of great recommendations here!

I'll add Christopher Priest's "The Affirmation." It's two stories with a sort of like a "butterfly dreaming it's a man or vice versa" type situation where it's unclear who is remembering or inventing the other.

There's also the Ray Bradbury short story "The Exiles," which is a bit like what happens in a sci-fi future where authors or genres are forgotten.

It's hard to talk about the show "Dark" without giving stuff away, but it's no secret that it involves time travel, and the question of "remembering" something you told yourself later, among other things.

There's a "Star Trek: TNG" episode where characters keep disappearing and the rest of the crew immediately forgets they ever existed, to the point where it starts becoming obvious and they try to figure out what's happening. And of course one of the best episodes ever, "The Inner Light," where Picard has a transformative experience along these lines...
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:57 PM on January 24, 2022

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Tamsyn Muir's Harrow the Ninth! This is the second book in the series in which (among many other things, course) the protagonist reviews events that happened in the first book and those memories are nowhere near what happened. Pretty cool stuff. And even if it's not about memory, both books are well worth the read because they are spectacular, pretty unusual, thought-provoking and yet very easy to read. Do it do it.
posted by ashbury at 6:11 PM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

A short story by Jennifer Egan which appears to be an extract from her novel mentioned by babelfish above is free to read or listen to at the New Yorker.
posted by riddley at 10:37 PM on January 24, 2022

I loved Guy Gavriel Kay's fantasy novel Tigana. It's a story about a peninsula, comprising several warring city-states, that's been invaded by two rival sorcerers. One of the city-states (Tigana) resists the invasion, and as punishment the sorcerer casts a spell to make everybody else unable to hear or remember the name Tigana at all. So there's this whole angle about how memory is involved in this process of creating a collective identity, and what happens when that memory is extinguished.
posted by number9dream at 4:12 AM on January 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Don Hertzfeldt's films (series of 3 'episodes) World of Tomorrow is centered around the concept of memory its relationship with our identity.
posted by the_querulous_night at 5:39 AM on January 25, 2022

I'm pretty sure Push has memory-related shenanigans- inserting memories and wiping them. A bit goofy, but not awful.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:20 AM on January 25, 2022

The Book of M
posted by Tabitha Someday at 2:06 PM on January 25, 2022

Memory by Lois Bujold largely centers on a character who has spent his adult life with an artificially-enhanced perfect memory losing that ability and learning to cope with how normal people remember things. There are a lot of other things going on, though, so I do recommend reading the prior books in the series first.
posted by mmoncur at 6:07 AM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I see that most of my favorite books have already been mentioned, but I'll add a couple anyway:

Probably not quite what you meant, but The Memory Collectors by Kim Neville.

Also, Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty is a locked room mystery where a group of clones wake up missing 26 years of memory. (And it deals with a lot of issues around brain scans and hacking thereof.)
posted by elizabot at 10:31 PM on January 26, 2022

La Jetee and its US descendant 12 Monkeys is a good example.
posted by lon_star at 5:01 PM on January 28, 2022