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psocoptera) wrote2025-04-06 10:45 pm
psocoptera) wrote2025-04-06 10:45 pm
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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.)
Spoilers below!
To come back to the question of sameness of voice: some of the choices of obituaries or documents felt a lot less obviously connected than others. So why are they there? What is this book in a Watsonian sense? My read is that it's Peregrine's book, that the whole thing is her search history as she tries to "think" about Poppy and how Poppy came to be and how she herself came to be, and to come to terms with what happened to Poppy. That having started life as an LLM, it's her nature to imitate and borrow, and so she's particularly looking at these texts that involve parents and children, grief and epitaphs and etymologies, to find all the pieces she needs for her own story. The obituary for Mike Mattingly, one of the obit writers, raises the possibility of inventing different feel-good endings for people's incomplete life stories, so I think there's a possible interpretation where Poppy really did die by suicide, and the whole idea of her faking her death to escape is something that Peregrine borrowed and elaborated into this fantasy of her having lived at sea, and in this interpretation Peregrine might be altering/rewriting some of the obituaries to fit her new story, which could explain some of the same-voiceyness. However, I think there's too much supporting detail - the FOIA requests, plus there's no reason for the Disengagists to kill Hester Moss if Moss didn't kill Avid to protect Poppy. So, I've concluded that all the texts are true/original in the book's universe, and the voice was just a writing problem.
Second question: in the center of the book there is a magic trick or miracle that creates the alternate history in which everything post-WWII takes place - none of it happens if Anne Frank doesn't inspire Ari Epstein (and also doesn't give birth to Margot). A) what's up with that, and B) are there any other timeline-changing tricks or miracles? I couldn't find any, unless Harry Caruso had foreknowledge of his death (if it wasn't a suicide). As for what's up with it... two things. One is the possibility of Greta Levy channeling Saint Wilgefortis, or people's belief in Saint Wilgefortis - maybe because Pellegrino and Flechette made the movie, creating enough passion - she dons the beard and is thus able to perform one miracle, which she uses to send the medicine back in time to save Anne Frank. (It's not clear that anybody else's art ever makes enough "energy" for a miracle, although Amelia Sargent's Madame X concert seems like it *could* have. The other person most identified with Wilgefortis is Peregrine, and possibly Poppy is the miracle, but we're always so removed from that core part of the story that's it's hard to say much about it for sure.) It also made me think of Le Guin's idea of the hinge, the change point, and how Le Guin did something like this in The Telling, the one supernatural event in the middle of the otherwise not-magical book, although hers doesn't particularly change anything. I would love to hear Robins talk about how she decided to include this aspect of the story or decided to tie her fictional web of artists to Anne Frank.
Spoilers below!
To come back to the question of sameness of voice: some of the choices of obituaries or documents felt a lot less obviously connected than others. So why are they there? What is this book in a Watsonian sense? My read is that it's Peregrine's book, that the whole thing is her search history as she tries to "think" about Poppy and how Poppy came to be and how she herself came to be, and to come to terms with what happened to Poppy. That having started life as an LLM, it's her nature to imitate and borrow, and so she's particularly looking at these texts that involve parents and children, grief and epitaphs and etymologies, to find all the pieces she needs for her own story. The obituary for Mike Mattingly, one of the obit writers, raises the possibility of inventing different feel-good endings for people's incomplete life stories, so I think there's a possible interpretation where Poppy really did die by suicide, and the whole idea of her faking her death to escape is something that Peregrine borrowed and elaborated into this fantasy of her having lived at sea, and in this interpretation Peregrine might be altering/rewriting some of the obituaries to fit her new story, which could explain some of the same-voiceyness. However, I think there's too much supporting detail - the FOIA requests, plus there's no reason for the Disengagists to kill Hester Moss if Moss didn't kill Avid to protect Poppy. So, I've concluded that all the texts are true/original in the book's universe, and the voice was just a writing problem.
Second question: in the center of the book there is a magic trick or miracle that creates the alternate history in which everything post-WWII takes place - none of it happens if Anne Frank doesn't inspire Ari Epstein (and also doesn't give birth to Margot). A) what's up with that, and B) are there any other timeline-changing tricks or miracles? I couldn't find any, unless Harry Caruso had foreknowledge of his death (if it wasn't a suicide). As for what's up with it... two things. One is the possibility of Greta Levy channeling Saint Wilgefortis, or people's belief in Saint Wilgefortis - maybe because Pellegrino and Flechette made the movie, creating enough passion - she dons the beard and is thus able to perform one miracle, which she uses to send the medicine back in time to save Anne Frank. (It's not clear that anybody else's art ever makes enough "energy" for a miracle, although Amelia Sargent's Madame X concert seems like it *could* have. The other person most identified with Wilgefortis is Peregrine, and possibly Poppy is the miracle, but we're always so removed from that core part of the story that's it's hard to say much about it for sure.) It also made me think of Le Guin's idea of the hinge, the change point, and how Le Guin did something like this in The Telling, the one supernatural event in the middle of the otherwise not-magical book, although hers doesn't particularly change anything. I would love to hear Robins talk about how she decided to include this aspect of the story or decided to tie her fictional web of artists to Anne Frank.