Remember You Will Die

Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins, 2024 sff novel. Epistolary near-future science fiction and alternate history, told primarily as a series of obituaries, interspersed with a few other kinds of documents like newspaper articles or search results. I really enjoy this kind of playing with format, and on the whole it's a pretty neat project. It's not perfect - too many of the obituaries are written with too-similar a voice, even the ones that are pretty distant in time period and should sound more different. (And there are a couple of characters who are themselves the writers of some of the obituaries, and I might have liked them to have more distinct voices from each other, for it to be more obvious when one of them was writing.) (Although there might be reasons for some of this, see below.) Also, this book has a bit of a "jack of all trades master of none" problem, in that it's trying to do a lot of things at once, and I felt like some of them were working against each other - the satirical parts undermining the parts trying to be profound or touching, the fantasy elements somewhat at odds with the science fiction. At its strongest it was a clever and creative look at the idea of legacy and artistic influence/inspiration and the ways influence moves out from people in multiple directions which sometimes recross. (I did make a second pass through the book to draw a crazy chart of the connections and caught a couple that I hadn't on my first read. Also a timeline of the events of one particular time period. It was that kind of book.)

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2025 Hugo nominees!

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