Have you turned off your Lens, turned off your i-Sys, stepped away from the cloud, and just tried to REMEMBER something? It’s hard, and the memories are mutable. The cloud is just there, all the time. You reach for it without thinking and assume it will be there. [p. 25]
Novella set a century or two in our future: Katya Gould is a dealer in Authenticities and Captures, seeking out old tech such as typewriters and selling them to collectors. She's fascinated by wabi-sabi, the marks of use and decay on an object: 'something that witnesses and records the graceful decay of life'. And she records everything she experiences, thinks, sees -- until she meets a man in the forest and he somehow severs her connection to ... everything.
Kowal explores our increasing reliance on technology and the way it distances us from the real world, and especially the natural world. Katya's abductor, who calls himself 'Johnny', at first seems to be hunting deer: but perhaps his real purpose out in the forest, out of the connected world, is something more like Katya's own.
The story is presented as Katya's account (typed on a 1918 Corona typewriter) of the days she spent in the forest with Johnny. She's constantly questioning her own memories, wondering what she has forgotten. And her fear of the forest, of a world for which she has no map, is vividly described.
I hadn't realised this was a novella when I started reading, so was surprised by what felt like an abrupt and sudden ending. When I thought about it, I realised that although Forest of Memory has the bones of a novel, it stands complete and solid in itself.
I bought this in March 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.
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