This is another mainstream novel that I picked up because it has a somewhat science-fiction premise. It’s even new and was included in The Economist as one of their best books of the year. To me however this is another case of a mainstream book that isn’t really about the technology at its core at all but how its presence and its invention altered the lives of a group of people the novel chooses to follow. It’s also a stylistically clever book in which each chapter is drastically different, including one that is written entirely as text messages between characters. I was impressed by the quality of the writing and the complex psychological profiles of the many weird characters in it, but this was never intended to be science-fiction at all.

Tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is already the king of social media but still feels unfulfilled and is looking for his second act. He participates anonymously in an academic workshop about himself and gets the idea of developing the technology to record memories and thoughts. Users can then choose to upload this to the cloud in exchange for access to the memories of others. The technology is immensely successful and sweeps across the world. Each chapter in this book is a really a separate short story about individuals in Bouton’s orbit, as well as the orbits of other key characters like Miranda Kline, an anthropologist who invents an algorithm to predict people that Bouton makes use of, and Lou Kline, Miranda’s ex-husband and a successful music executive. Many of these characters are from Egan’s earlier breakout novel, which I have not read, and I don’t think is required reading. Many of the stories have nothing to do with the memory externalization technology at all, but are relevant simply because they are friends or family members of these key people and so the trajectories of their lives have therefore been shaped by its invention.

I didn’t know what I was in for when I started reading this and was totally engrossed by the first chapter of Bouton being a famous tech entrepreneur who gets inspiration by walking the streets as a younger, unknown version of himself. So I was disappointed to find that this one chapter from Bouton’s perspective is all we get. The entire book consists of these one-shots, representing a kind of summation of a person’s life and spans many decades in time. The stories are astonishingly diverse. While many are more normal ones about a child having to deal with the legacy of having a famous parent, or a middle sibling trying to stand out from the other children, one is effectively a James Bond-style spy story for example, and one is about a an American soldier turned special operations specialist turned assassin. Each story more or less stands alone and are easily digestible. The complexity of the book that some critics heap praises on lies in mapping the relationships between the characters which may not be readily apparent at first glance. I think many readers feel thrilled when they work out these connections as they realize how developments in one character’s life may have influenced another character much later. Personally I don’t see how this matters as it makes the readers feels like small town gossips obsessing over whatever happened to so-and-so who we used to know.

The memory externalization technology barely figures in the plot and plays no part at all in many stories. Other stories do mention how it has changed the world and its benefits to society, such as increased empathy between strangers and helping solve crimes. But that is all in passing and not the point of any of the stories at all. Most of the characters who are featured are actually skeptics of the technology who shun it completely or want to limit its use. Bouton himself is later revealed to have intended it for private use only to help people recall past episodes of their lives and opposed sharing them online. This means that as one might expect from a mainstream novel, this is a markedly Luddite take on novel technology. There is also no scientific rigor in it at all as the technology as presented essentially works like magic. It is able to read all memories and past thoughts of everyone after spending several hours with electrodes connected to a box. Egan perhaps thinks she is being clever with ideas like the algebraization of basic story elements but the mathematic equations she uses don’t even pass a cursory inspection. Why is emphasizing the role of the protagonist i² but diminishing his importance only i⁄2? Does she not understand that the exclamation mark in mathematics means a factorial? It’s always so annoying when mainstream writers take so much effort with detailed psychological profiles of characters and yet are so lazy when it comes to science and math.

That said, the quality of the prose itself is fantastic and I enjoyed just about every story taken on their own individual merits. I feel that the underlying theme is the familiar one that life takes people in all kinds of unexpected directions and that no matter what happened before, people can and do have second and even third acts in their lives. The stories all emphasize the inner lives of their characters, as opposed to being about the world itself as would be the case for science-fiction. As is usual with such introspective pieces, characters who are broken in some way are overrepresented, addicts and obsessives or people who are just out of step with everyone else. I’m especially amused by the story of the regular person who has lived a normal, ordinary life in all respects according to a master plan of his own, but has been storing up stress and pressure all the time until it erupts violently and completely derails his life. I note that while awful things happen to the characters, the overall tone is a positive one and the characters generally manage to find redemption or achieve some measure of inner peace. Critics praise Egan for her creativity and that is certainly true. At the same time, the book also perfectly conforms to the established pattern that I have come to expect of mainstream writers working on the fringes of science-fiction.

As with Sea of Tranquility that I read a few months prior, this book reminded me of why I mostly read science-fiction and not mainstream fiction. I think I would have minded it less if we had spent more time with each character instead of it casting so wide a net over so many characters. I was also annoyed by critics calling this a book written by a digital native of the 21st century and it really, really isn’t when it holds no enthusiasm at all for the positive aspects of social media use. Perhaps I ought to read more of the classic works of mainstream literature instead of spending time on these more modern books.