Customer Reviews

Memory

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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Nagata's world-building here is pretty cool. The setting is a ringworld-orbital where things have gone Terribly Wrong. A long-ago war damaged the habitat, and the construction & maintenance nanoassembler-fogs (the silver), have become a menace to the players, their 'mechanics' (cool hi-tech machines) and their homes. The only safe places to live are temple-complexes around kobold wells -- the temple kobolds, small programmable mechanics, exude a sweet-smelling silver-repellent.

It's a pretty neat setup, an appealing combination of a half-understood high-tech background, a likeable heroine, a nasty villain, and a Quest... So I was having a good time until along about p.200 or so, I started realising that nothing much had happened for awhile, except that the Evil Villain (and/or his minions) was chasing the heroine (and/or her Faithful Friends, and always with her Cute Doggie) through varying landscapes, over and over again. I'm sorry to report that this is pretty much what happens in the rest of the book. The ending's pretty soggy, too.

I'd say Ms. Nagata needed a Stern Editor for this one, or else more inspiration.... Anyway, most everything else she's written is better than this. If you've never tried her (and you should), I'd start with LIMIT OF VISION, her best novel and a standalone. Or, for an appealing sample, her Nebula-award-winning novella "Goddesses", available online.

Happy reading--

Pete Tillman

I read this book when it first came out. It was good, but didn't make much of an impression. Just this week I read it again and I think it's really, really good.

The key to following the story might be this. Picture a story set in the far, far future, where people have godlike powers. Two people create a whole new planet and populate it with organisms. The organisms are very close to human; their bodies and personalities are initially patterned on the avatars of folks who are "playing" in this new "playground," but they are real biological (as opposed to mechanical) beings and they proceed to establish their own families, traditions, and civilization. Meanwhile, the "gods" who created this place have a furious argument, resulting in planet-wide ecological damage. Then they get bored and abandon their project!

BUT! -- "Memory" is not about these far-future "gods" -- it's about THEIR far future! -- the legacy of their creation as it plays out among the people living on their artificial-planet-project many tens of thousands of years later. For the people living there, the original genesis of their entire planet and its population have become mysterious ancient myths. Only IMPLICITLY is the book about "long-ago" era when the "gods" created their world and seeded it with life.

I hope this helps some of the readers who are having trouble. This is a beatifully written and truly thought-provoking book.

"Memory" is not as good as Nagata's earlier "Vast," which I would give five stars. For the uninitiated, however, "Vast" is even harder to follow than "Memory" -- MUCH harder, I would imagine.

Story:
Jubilee and her younger brother Jolly live in a world that is constantly being changed due to a mysterious silver cloud that alters anything that is inanimate and kills anything that is flesh. One night when Jubilee is ten Jolly is lost to the silver in a freak accident... or so she thinks. Several years later rumors begin to circulate about a man that can come in and out of the mist without being affected. Disregarding the rumors as hopeful fantasy Jubilee tries to move on with her life until one day she comes face to face with the man, who wants her long lost brother. What follows is an adventure that will reunite brother and sister but in the process tear their idea of history and reality apart while they try to prevent a flood of silver that will drown the world once and for all.
-----some spoilers-----
This was a differnt kind of story and it was pretty good in looking at what might happen if a Massively Multiplayer Theme world was left to its own devices after a war of sorts killed one ceator and left the other brain damaged and incaple of repairing the world or doing anything besides keeping what was left running. Most of the back story is figurable out without the author trying to invent technical details and a chapter later in the book does spell out exactly what happened. I really liked this book. The author took a differnt idea and ran with it. Would recommned this to anyone who likes fantasy with a little scifi thrown in and also those who are interested in diffent takes on MMORPGs.
m.a.c

Okay, yeah, this is a great book, and I found every bit of it totally absorbing. The only trouble is that it raises, via hints and even via the cover blurb, the expectation that the world will be more fully explained than it is. A quarter of the way through, I was thinking maybe it's been too long since I read hard sf, and I'm missing clues. After I finished, I thought maybe this was part of a series, all set in this strange world. Neither of those things was true; what I was looking for just wasn't there.

For me, at least, a prologue -- just two paragraphs -- would have been a help, before we get into Jubilee's point of view.

If the book had been labeled fantasy instead of sf, if the blurb hadn't begun, "Acclaimed hard-sf author Linda Nagata," if the clues to the world's genesis had been omitted, the disappointment at the end might have been lessened. We never did find out what "silver" is and what it can do.

It's still a great book, but I felt as if a contract had been broken. Almost like reading a murder mystery and not finding out whodunnit.

This is the first book I have read by Linda Nagata, but I think I may look up more. The cover claims she tends to write hard sci-fi, but this book really read more like a fantasy, as the scientific elements are never really explained. However, because of the knowledge base of the players who inhabit this world, I believe this decision on Nagata's part makes sense: although they interact with this tech every day, they don't understand it. How, then, can they explain it to us, the readers?

This story is primarily about Jubilee Huacho, who at the start of the story is a child. One day she climbs down their kobald well and burns herself with silver, which is a creeping mist/fog that comes at irregular intervals in most places of the world and destroys any biologicals it takes into itself. It also changes the world when it comes - taking away parts, adding others, which the players call follies. We never really come to understand *what* the silver is, only that it is important to the world; for some reason, without it, the world's ecology collapses. This also is never explained - just said to be so. That night, the silver comes all the way into the temple and takes her older brother, Jolly. Jubilee is horrified.

Years later, she is a headstrong young woman and is somewhat in love with her uncle, Liam, although in this world there can only ever be a single lover for any given player, as determined by blood testing (this also is never explained - the lack of explanations becomes a bit frustrating, thus my rating this book at 4 stars rather than 5). She discovers she has a lover, half-way across the world. One night while outside on the temple wall, a stranger walks out of the silver, asking for her brother Jolly. She tells him that Jolly is gone, with no further explanation, and the stranger goes back into the silver, causing it to rise rapidly. Jubilee races inside, only to find out from her mother that her father was just taken by the silver. Was this coincidence?

Not much more I can tell you about the general plot - from that point on Jubilee travels the world, searching for her brother and a way to stop the silver floods. She learns about herself and her past lives.

The idea is quite intriguing, though I would have been happier had some of the ideas been further explained. But, as I said, perhaps they were not explained because Nagata wanted to show just how ignorant the players are of their world and how it works.

Ten year old Jubilee lives with her parents and her brother Jolly in the remote outpost Temple Huacho located in the isolated wild of Kavasphir Hills, a place known for the frequency of the killing silver floods that terraforms the landscape with each new deluge. The family "owns" metabolic machines to keep them safe from the deadly quick flow of the silver. However, that fails when the silver claims Jolly while his younger sister watches in abject horror.

Several years later, a mysterious stranger seemingly walks out of the silver up to a teenage Jubilee asking for Jolly. Beside the awe of seeing what this man did, her fear of him makes her flee, but also wonder if her sibling lives. Needing to know, Jubilee plans to go on a quest to find her brother and learn the secrets of the silver accompanied by her Uncle Liam.

MEMORY is a powerful insightful coming of age science fiction thriller starring a wonderful protagonist seeking answers, but what she learns makes her wonder about a whole different set of personal questions rather than what she originally sought to understand. The story line is action packed yet contains a subtle theme of finding one's self to comprehend the world in which an individual resides. Though the silver remains ironically a somewhat unsolved puzzle, the reader will have a great time observing the brave heroine on her journey to ascertain the truth that takes her as much inside her self as the weird world she lives in.

Harriet Klausner

This was my first reading of anything by this author. I really enjoyed it because it was unpredictable, and the world created by the author was unlike anything I had come across before.

This book was OK, but somehow it didn't quite live up to my expectations. For one thing, it left a LOT of things unexplained at the end. I like a little shocking revellation with my sci-fi, and there was none of it here. This is, as others have noted, a coming-of-age tale first and foremost. The fact that it takes place in an alternate world is secondary, and while Nagata seems to have created a rich and fascinating history for her world, she doesn't bother sharing most of it with us.

What's left is the story of Jubilee, a young woman who has just learned that the brother she thought she lost seven years ago might still be alive. She sets out to find him, and on the way discovers that she is destined to either save or destroy the world - again. The premise of reincarnation is one that Nagata presents as matter-of-fact yet never bothers to explain, so we're left to take it on faith that Jubilee has, indeed, been there and done that before.

Perhaps the most interesting, and the most frustratingly enigmatic, character in the novel is the silver which rises to coat the land every night. the silver is an agent of both destruction and creation, taking away anything it touches and leaving in its place fantastic and surreal structures from eons past. Jubilee soon realizes that the balance of silver hangs on a knife-edge - too much and the world will drown in it, too little and the world will starve. Part of her destiny is to make that fateful choice.

But what is the silver? A biological entity? The fever dreams of an injured goddess? Illusion? We never find out, and for that I just can't forgive Nagata. She sets that question up over and over again, and it never gets answered or even addressed. Talk about leaving us hanging!

The writing is good, and what story is there is interesting. The characters needed some more development, and the plot tended to drag. I was torn between two and three stars, but the above issue with the silver just pushed me over the edge. I can't see recommending it to anyone who likes action and surprises in their fiction.

Linda Nagata's _Memory_ is the best coming-of-age novel I've ever read, and read, and read (I have several copies in different formats, and treasure the re-readings). It's also a deep blending of science fiction and fantasy that brings some of Roger Zelazny's works to mind (_e.g._ was _Lord of Light_ sci-fi or fantasy or another thing --- I like to think of LoL as a blending). It easily passes Ursula LeGuin's "Mrs Brown" test in that I can remember the protagonist's name "Jubilee" months and years later. Jubilee is "real" in all the senses of the word that matter here.

The gestalt is a strange almost pastoral world, not a sphere but a ring (unlike Larry Niven's _Ringworld_, this stage for her characters is on the outside surface), with no nations, no heavy industry, no flight, but possessing similar enough technologies (some from our future, some from our past) that they just "fit in", and do not distract from what counts, the story. There's an internet-like connectivity as well as nanotechnology. There are ordinary rifles, vehicles (a motorcycle that can adapt to and thus climb stairs is a nice touch), computers (but not what we have). And there's love, but it's not what we have either. And history _is_, not was, as the memory-of-the-world "silver" can bring back what once was, everything except for living creatures.

Nagata skillfully sets up this entirely believeable world, then proceeds at crucial points to break rules. This is hardly a new literary technique; she just does the breaking very skillfully and believeably.

And where does this world come from (I mean in the context of the characters and not from the obvious author)? Here Nagata begins to weave in a Zelazny-like mythology. And in this and other areas she gives enough detail for the reader to render mental imagery, but not enough to "explain".

That last point bears some discussion. What would the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" have meant if a voice-over "explained" it all? How much would such have weakened the conclusion? And HP Lovecraft's stories, could they really have been improved if he'd explained more? So I consider this one of Nagata's more subtle writing techniques that brings greatness to an already superb story.

It's hard to see how the story could have been either improved or extended (I don't believe there will be any sequel) or even imitated. It's the mark of a great book that it goes where no one else has gone, and so thoroughly plows new ground as to ensure no one else will be following. Just as Zelazny "owns" Amber, and Tony Hillerman owns the Navajo-detective genre, Nagata owns _Memory_.

I quite enjoyed this book - it is a lovely epic coming-of-age story set in a fantasy future. The language is enjoyable, the heroine goes through real adventures, the heros and villains are anything but monochromatic, and as the story advances the young heroine changes and grows and comes to understand the origins of her self and her world.

Some of the other reviews I've read here express disappointment in the book because it leaves quite a bit of the technology behind the magic unexplained. I think if you approach it hoping for some deep tech denoument, you will in fact be disappointed, but if you read it as a fantasy, you'll be less likely to fall into that trap. This is more the way someone from beyond a technological singularity might tell a story that happened in a post-singularity world to a person of our time.