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A review by tatterededges
MEM by Bethany C. Morrow
3.0
The writing was good and the premise was fascinating but unfortunately, it just didn’t deliver. There are some pretty big concepts in this book that never really get explored adequately. Themes of people as property, absence of rights for some sections of the community, social rules where mem’s aren’t even acknowledged. Were the mem’s really just a metaphor for slavery and racism?
Taking it on face value, the book raised far more questions than it ever answered. Who is Delores and why does she need to keep having memories extracted? And why does she need to keep extracting memories when her brain is fractured and she is, for intents and purposes, suffering dementia? If creating Elsie destroyed her, why would her family ever have supported her creating more?
I’m confused why they just let Elsie go off and live her life, this “not person” creation who never ages and is technically owned by some rich people who prefer not to think about her. Did they pay her rent? Did she work? If she worked, how did she explain her lack of aging? If she could learn and create memories of her own and feel emotions, why wasn’t she more pissed off at the notion of being reprinted? It was essentially her being pointlessly executed after all. Yet she was so apathetic about everything, which is kind of ironic given she was supposed to be an epiphany.
The ending was just odd. I’m sceptical that he would have gone and had all his memories of Elsie extracted knowing all that he did about the side effects of memory extraction, the science behind it and the uniqueness of Elsie. Which brings me to another gaping hole in the book: The Science. There was no explanation of the science behind it. Why extracting a memory require a human lookalike casing? Did the mem materialise out of nothing or did they have to grow the mem?
This book was short. I read it in the course of a few hours. I wonder if maybe this would have been better as a full novel rather than a novella. At any rate, while I was engaged in the book and enjoyed reading it, the book which had so much potential just didn’t deliver.
Taking it on face value, the book raised far more questions than it ever answered. Who is Delores and why does she need to keep having memories extracted? And why does she need to keep extracting memories when her brain is fractured and she is, for intents and purposes, suffering dementia? If creating Elsie destroyed her, why would her family ever have supported her creating more?
I’m confused why they just let Elsie go off and live her life, this “not person” creation who never ages and is technically owned by some rich people who prefer not to think about her. Did they pay her rent? Did she work? If she worked, how did she explain her lack of aging? If she could learn and create memories of her own and feel emotions, why wasn’t she more pissed off at the notion of being reprinted? It was essentially her being pointlessly executed after all. Yet she was so apathetic about everything, which is kind of ironic given she was supposed to be an epiphany.
The ending was just odd. I’m sceptical that he would have gone and had all his memories of Elsie extracted knowing all that he did about the side effects of memory extraction, the science behind it and the uniqueness of Elsie. Which brings me to another gaping hole in the book: The Science. There was no explanation of the science behind it. Why extracting a memory require a human lookalike casing? Did the mem materialise out of nothing or did they have to grow the mem?
This book was short. I read it in the course of a few hours. I wonder if maybe this would have been better as a full novel rather than a novella. At any rate, while I was engaged in the book and enjoyed reading it, the book which had so much potential just didn’t deliver.