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A Constellation Novel
by Yiming Ma
For fans of Cloud Atlas and The Power, a hauntingly beautiful and profoundly prescient debut set in a future where China is the sole global superpower and citizens can record and transfer memories between minds.
When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me stories of a world before memories could be shared between strangers…
Decades from now, the world is run by an authoritarian state called Qin. In Qin, every citizen is fitted with a Mindbank, an intracranial device capable of not only recording but transferring memories between minds. The technology gives birth to a new economy, referred to as Memory Capitalism, where anyone with means can relive the life experiences of others. It also unleashes opportunities for manipulation—memories can be edited, marketed, and even corrupted for personal gain.
When a man inherits his deceased mother's Mindbank—a collection of memories from before, during, and after the global war that landed Qin atop the international food chain—he's unsure what he'll find inside, or whether the Party has gotten to her memories first, altering the experiences she left for him. Either way, he is adamant that he must share them with the world before they are destroyed forever, even if the cost of doing so is his own life.
Powerful and provocative, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us is a kaleidoscopic look into the ways in which governments and media manipulate history and control our collective imagination. It encourages us to see beyond the sheen of convenient truths to unearth real stories of struggle, sacrifice, and love that, despite all odds, refuse to be eradicated.
"This novel-in-stories, set in a dystopian future in which memories can be downloaded from one mind to another, asks provocative questions about narrative, humanity, and love…The premise of Ma's debut novel provides ample opportunity for both metafictional playfulness and deadly serious commentary on our fraught relationship with technology." —Booklist (starred review)
"A dangerous inheritance upends everything a young man knows in Ma's timely and impressive debut. Readers of literary dystopian fiction will find much to enjoy in this thought-provoking debut." —Library Journal (starred review)
"A chilling dystopian novel in stories...Ma bravely and lucidly portrays how an authoritarian regime seeks to control people's minds, and how people's lives can be commodified by technology. This timely work leaves readers with much to chew on." —Publishers Weekly
This information about These Memories Do Not Belong to Us was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Yiming Ma holds an MBA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His stories and essays appear in the New York Times, the Guardian, The Florida Review, Ricepaper, and elsewhere. His story "Swimmer of Yangtze" won the 2018 Guardian 4th Estate Short Story Prize. His work has been shortlisted and/or a finalist for the Gulf Coast Prize, Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, LitMag Virginia Woolf Prize, and Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He has been awarded grants for residencies and conferences such as the Sewanee Writers' Conference, VQR Writers' Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. Born in Shanghai, he now lives between Toronto and Tokyo.
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