Tuesday, March 10, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Memory by Linda Nagata




Memory is a SF/F novel from genre author Linda Nagata, a well established writer in the genre.  I've generally liked Nagata's work, with her solid MilSci trilogy "The Red" being one of the first things I read after I got back into reading the genre a few years back.  More recently I've been enjoying her more high concept SF novels in her Nanotech Succession/Inverted Frontier series (see my review of Edges here), even though those types of novels aren't usually my thing.  The most recent of those novels, Silver, serves as as sequel to both its predecessor Edges and to Memory, and as I liked Silver a lot, I was interested to see how events started back in Memory.

Memory isn't high concept scifi - indeed, if you hadn't read Silver to note the technology basis for this world, you'd might feel this world is far more fantastical than science fiction - and is a lot more of a character story than the inverted frontier novels.  And I liked it, although not nearly as much as I did the story on this same world in Silver - it's a fun story of a young teenage woman in a strange broken world trying to figure out who she is and who she wants to be while questing for her family, but never really leapt out into true greatness for me.


--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
On a strange artificial world, the inhabitants - the players - live in a world that can change on a nightly basis.  Since he world's goddess was broken in a fight against the Dark God, the mysterious Silver comes forth every night to change the landscape outside of certain safe zones, leaving behind new...and sometimes old shapes and structures in its wake.  Anyone caught by the silver is never seen again, and while players are reborn throughout the ages, they do not remember their past lives directly, as they try to survive and make a life on this world.  And on this world, every player has only other person they may find to be their lover, and many go their entire lives - multiple lives - without finding their literal soulmate.

As a young girl, 10 year old Jubilee saw her older brother Jolly taken by the Silver, seemingly lost forever.  But seven years later, Jubilee is confronted by a mysterious stranger who seems to control the Silver and claims Jolly is still alive....and demands to know where he is.  And so Jubilee sets out on a quest to the far side of the world to find Jolly, and the lover who supposedly lives in that part of the world, and to figure out what is truly going on with this world.  But what Jubilee will find is that the impacts of past lives are still being felt in her time, and that as a result, the stranger wants to bring about the end of all.....and only Jubilee may stand a chance at stopping him.
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Memory is told in a first person narrative, entirely from Jubilee's point of view.  It's an interesting world, almost like a video game world in which the inhabitants are the players trying to figure out and deal with the rules - in fact the humans on this world call themselves "players".  You have a level changing phenomenon in the silver, you have characters being reborn in new lives after death, and you have characters with set soulmates from the beginning somewhere out in the world, even if they may never find them, and those soulmates remain the same from life to life.  And then you have the savants - the minor computers that characters travel with and can move around - the mechanics, the kobolds, etc.  But Nagata makes this world really work as a setting for a novel (and the video-gamey nature would get sort of explained in concept in her later work, Silver).

This mainly works because Jubilee is a really solid lead character and this is her story.  Adventurous to an extent but not without caution (especially after her earlier experiences), quick thinking about new circumstances she finds in her journey with a good kind heart, she's really easy to root for throughout.  And as she's confronted with some pretty tough truths about the world and her place in it, her reactions are always very believable, making it extremely easy to empathize with her.  Even when she hesitates in places she shouldn't, you understand why she would, and she definitely carries this story from beginning to end as the plot follows her winding journey from home with her parents to the far side of the world, with all the twists and turns along the way.  I was mildly spoiled about some of those twists by reading Silver first, but only mildly, and if you're coming in fresh they'll work even better (and if you're not coming in fresh, they still work).

Still, part of why I didn't quite love Memory as much as I did Silver, which features the same world (as well as Jubilee in a major role) is a personal preference - I'm not really a huge fan of books that spend large amounts of time in descriptive passages of the setting.  This book isn't as bad as other books in that regard, but as a lot of this book is Jubilee journeying to new places and seeing the strange new things she finds there, and I kind of glaze over those parts.  Again, that's a personal preference more than anything, and other readers will enjoy these parts more than I did.  From a less subjective sense, I also found that the book's ending comes really quickly - the arc of Jubilee's relationship with one character feels like it never gets out of the first act before it's concluded*, so that the book can move into its ending sequence overall.

Spoilers in ROT13: V'z ersreevat gb Whovyrr'f eryngvbafuvc jvgu Lncurg - Whovyrr ortvaf gur obbx hafher bs jurgure fur ernyyl jnagf gb svaq ure ybire sebz gur fgneg, ohg nf fur gnyxf bire jveryrff jvgu Lncurg orpbzrf vagrerfgrq....bayl gb orpbzr srneshy gung ur'f znq jura fur frrf uvf sylvat znpuvar, naq gb or pbashfrq ol gur snpg Xncuvev funerf gur fnzr snpr.  Naq gura va gur fubeg fcna bs cntrf gurl'er culfvpnyyl va gur fnzr cynpr, Whovyrr vf znvayl qvfgenpgrq jvgu Xncuvev naq gur fvghngvba naq lrg gur obbx npgf yvxr uvf qrngu vf hggreyl urnegoernxvat sbe Whovyrr, nf vs fur'q fcrag n ybatre gvzr jvgu uvz naq gehyl snyyra sbe uvz.  Vg whfg srryf yvxr gurve eryngvbafuvc arire tbg bhg bs svefg trne orsber Lncurg'f qrngu qbrfa'g dhvgr jbex nf n erfhyg.

So yeah, Memory's a solid book, just not quite the type I love so much.  I'll continue to make my way through Nagata's backlog at a slow pace, as I've yet to have a bad experience with her, and this book adds to that streak.
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