Memory

by Linda Nagata

Book Overview

A quest, a puzzle, and multiple lives: On an artificial world with a forgotten past, floods of "silver" rise in the night like fog, rewriting the landscape and consuming those caught in its cold... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312877218
• ISBN13: 9780312877217
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

World Wide Multiplayer game gone wrong = Great Story.

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

Novel, engrossing, escapist

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.

A wonderful fantasy set in a science fiction setting.

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.

Future comes to life

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.

powerful insightful coming of age science fiction thriller

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