Memory

I've long thought Linda Nagata a hidden gem in modern sf. Her first novels delighted me, especially the inventive Vast. Memory is a fine example of Nagata's skills. It offers rich and surprising world-building along with empathetic and fiercely challenged characters. It's accessible yet never easy, and ultimately moving and memorable. The plot - well, without spoilers, I can say that it involves a quest to understand a peculiar world. Our heroine is born on a ringworld of sorts, where a terrifying silver cloud remakes the landscape and easily kills people. People are all reincarnated, learning skills and memories from their past lives as children. This hits us with a sneaky opening paragraph, where the narrator describes her favorite blanket from when she was a kid, and how it had nice stars on it echoing some stars in the sky. And then the third sentence of the novel:For if there was no Heaven, I reasoned, then the dead would always be reborn in this world and not the next, no matter how wise they became in life.We're wrong-footed right away, while caught up in a child's mind. Powerful opening move, and Nagata never wavers from that zone of strangeness and intimacy. Swiftly she suffers a terrible loss, then another, and grows into her - ah, I'll stop there. Part of the pleasure of Memory is exploring its world. I can add that it plays with the border between science fiction and fantasy, engineering and spells, legends and virtual worlds, deities and archivists. Relationships arise and twist. And there's a fun shout-out to a classic hard sf novel that inspired this one (223). Now for spoilers. (view spoiler)[The end is heartbreaking, as the main love interest is shattered - not only for this life cycle, but for all time. And the father, unlike Jolly, never comes back. Most of the population has been killed. We're told at once point that this world was broken, along with the goddess who made it. We are all condemned to a cycle of death and birth and terrible loneliness that can be stopped only by a final great flood of silver. (214)Yet the finale leaves open little room for hope. So why are people "players"? Was the world a game, a kind of MMO set up to run itself? At one point Jolly, who seems to have special knowledge, observes that "All of us, we are like the kobolds... We all have configuration codes." (253) I ask in part because of the compulsions layered over players, so that Jubilee feels attracted to Kaphiri ("His warmth stirred in me a corrupt desire" (368)), who killed her father and many more. (hide spoiler)] Well, I welcome comments of fellow readers, and commend Memory.