36 | New Scientist | 7 May 2022
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The sci-fi column
YOUR autobiographical memory
can’t be trusted, and science has
determined that this isn’t a bug,
but a feature. The remembered
stories from which we braid our
identity bend and swerve to
serve the narrative needs of
our circumstances because our
minds happily trade veracity
for coherence and narrative.
This strange space between
recollection and construction
is explored in two mesmerising
books out this month.
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
concerns itself with how this
constant process of layering
and recasting can create meaning
and purpose in the most desolate
circumstances. The story starts
on a ship dodging icebergs in
the North Sea during the 17th
century, and unfolds into a
virtuoso genre-hopping puzzle.
It isn’t every day you get to
experience a perfect collision of
the Romantic macabre of Edgar
Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft
with The Usual Suspects and 2001:
A Space Odyssey. So much of the
book’s joy is working out which
bits are real and which aremisdirection on the way to
unlocking the final mystery.
Trust me, you don’t want this
spoiled by more plot details.
It is no spoiler to say that
Reynolds shows how such stories
can be moulded to make us better
humans. But memories can
also be weaponised to keep our
identities in stupefied thrall tocapitalism, and this darker aspect
gets an ample airing in Oliver
Langmead’s Glitterati.
The star of this speculative
satire is Simone. He is a fashionite,
a rarefied type of super influencer
whose every whim is lavishly
catered for and documented
by magazines read only by
fashionites. For example, during
a brief hospitalisation, he spies a
regular proletarian gown among
the haute couture medical gowns
available to him. He complainsIdentity crisis Shades of dark romanticism and late 19th-century social savagery
haunt two wild new books, which are united in their exploration of how unreliably
memories construct our identity, says Sally Adee“ Glitterati starts like
puff pastry, stuffed
with buffoonery,
but it ends like a
shot of Black Mirror”and the item is summarily burned.
Simone and his fabulous friends
and enemies are suspended in a
vicious, never-ending battle for
status, fought through clothes,
make-up and accessories,
sometimes leaving literal fashion
victims in their wake. This sense
of dangerously pointy high stakes
beneath the ruffles and froth
recalls writers like Edith Wharton,
whose stories dissect the mores
of the very rich who lived and
schemed during the so-called
Gilded Age of the 19th-century US.
Beyond a deft, wicked skewering
of influencer culture, Langmead
inhabits his protagonists’
fetishistic delight with the
material world. His deliciously
sensory prose puts you inside
that colossal closet, running your
fingers through the gossamer
folds of a spider-silk gown.
Glitterati starts like puff pastry,
a comedy of manners stuffed with
buffoonery and characters whose
trivial, self-inflicted miseries you
can chortle at with abandon. But
it ends like a shot of^ Black Mirror.
Simone’s lifestyle isn’t without
costs. Along with the right clothes,
he needs the right memories.
And that is when a darker reality
emerges, showing why these
fluffy idiots can’t care about
anything more than matching
their outrageously expensive
outfits to their false eyelashes.
At this point, it becomes clear
that rather than being privileged
scions, people like Simone are just
pretty cogs in a vast apparatus that
grinds humanity into capital. The
reader begins to sympathise and
have a stake in Simone’s ability
to escape – and perhaps also starts
to wonder which forces bend our
own (flawed) memories. ❚ONURDONGEL
/GETT
Y^ I
MAGESMemories are subject to
the same pressures as
fashion in GlitteratiBooks
Eversion
Alastair Reynolds
GollanczGlitterati
Oliver Langmead
TitanSally also
recommends...Book
The This
Adam Roberts
Gollancz
Memory also plays a
starring role in The This
by Adam Roberts, but the
utility of an individual’s
identity itself is called
into question in this
mash-up of the sum of Nick
Bostrom’s worst fears in
Superintelligence and the
alien weirdness of Arthur
C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.Sally Adee is a technology
and science writer based
in London. Follow her on
Twitter @sally_adee