Bethany C Morrow is an author of speculative literary fiction, and a recovering expatriate. A California native, she has lived in Bangor (Wales, UK), Montreal (Quebec, Canada), and now resides just over the border in the US northeast.
MEM by Bethany C. Morrow
Set in an alternate 1920s world, MEM (2018) is a short novel about a woman who is the physical manifestation of a memory extraction process. If someone has a traumatic memory they want to get rid of, Professor Toutant can remove it. The memory then becomes a physical person who lives in the “vault” below the health center at a university in Montreal. (The vault is very similar to a mental or convalescent care ward.) Most of these “mems,” whose brains carry not much beyond the extracted memory, sit around being cared for in the vault until they eventually pass away. Some of them are able to interact in the world better than others. Some even visit with the person whose memory they’re from.
Our protagonist, a mem who was the first extracted memory ever created by Professor Toutant, seems to somehow have retained a copy of the brain of the woman named Dolores from whom she ... Read More
