About this Event
Join author Yiming Ma at Books Inc. Palo Alto for a reading and discussion of his dystopian novel THESE MEMORIES DO NOT BELONG TO US, set in a world where memories are bought and sold.
Yiming will be in conversation with fellow author Vanessa Hua.
About the book: For fans of Cloud Atlas and The Power, a hauntingly beautiful and profoundly prescient debut set in a future where China is the sole global superpower and citizens can record and transfer memories between minds.
When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me stories of a world before memories could be shared between strangers…
Decades from now, the world is run by an authoritarian state called Qin. In Qin, every citizen is fitted with a Mindbank, an intracranial device capable of not only recording but transferring memories between minds. The technology gives birth to a new economy, referred to as Memory Capitalism, where anyone with means can relive the life experiences of others. It also unleashes opportunities for manipulation—memories can be edited, marketed, and even corrupted for personal gain.
When a man inherits his deceased mother’s Mindbank—a collection of memories from before, during, and after the global war that landed Qin atop the international food chain—he’s unsure what he’ll find inside, or whether the Party has gotten to her memories first, altering the experiences she left for him. Either way, he is adamant that he must share them with the world before they are destroyed forever, even if the cost of doing so is his own life.
Powerful and provocative, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us is a kaleidoscopic look into the ways in which governments and media manipulate history and control our collective imagination. It encourages us to see beyond the sheen of convenient truths to unearth real stories of struggle, sacrifice, and love that, despite all odds, refuse to be eradicated.
“This novel-in-stories, set in a dystopian future in which memories can be downloaded from one mind to another, asks provocative questions about narrative, humanity, and love…The premise of Ma’s debut novel provides ample opportunity for both metafictional playfulness and deadly serious commentary on our fraught relationship with technology.” -Booklist (starred review)
"Yiming Ma’s stunning debut is deeply imaginative in its portrayal of a near-future dystopia, and profoundly humane in its exploration of memory and the stories that make us who we are.”-Vincent Lam, Giller Prize-winning author of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures
"A mesmerizing debut! A deeply felt and meticulously crafted novel that entrances the reader from the first sentence to its last." -Jason Mott, National Book Award-winning author of Hell of a Book
"This isn’t just a novel. It’s a revolutionary experiment in how our memories and histories can save us. By turns heartbreaking and eerily prescient, Yiming Ma’s ambitious debut breaks open the hidden parts of us and scatters them across the night sky for you to discover." -Sequoia Nagamatsu, National Bestselling author of How High We Go in the Dark
"Yiming Ma's engaging, inventive debut grips you from its first sentence. . . . Ma marries our current anxiety around surveillance, technology, personal data, and geopolitical unrest with an imagined future where, despite best efforts, stories remain a tool for connection, education, and revolution." -Lillian Li, Women's Prize for Fiction longlisted author of Number One Chinese Restaurant
"Ma’s brilliantly inventive These Memories Do Not Belong to Us weaves worlds around a central question: What happens when technology enables a totalitarian government to break into the last private frontiers of the internal mind? Chilling, poignant, and uncomfortably timely, Ma’s braided memory dispatches explore a future in which the shifting concepts of safety, loyalty, and truth lead nowhere except condemnation." -Tessa Hulls, author of Pulitzer Prize-winner Feeding Ghosts
“Extraordinary. A melancholic mosaic of lives brilliantly bearing witness to the ways memories shape and reshape individuals, nations, histories and futures.” -Ai Jiang, author of Nebula Award-winning Linghun
About the author: Born in Shanghai, Yiming Ma spent a decade in the tech and finance world across New York, Toronto, London, Berlin and South Africa before writing the dystopian novel THESE MEMORIES DO NOT BELONG TO US, set in a world where memories are bought and sold. He attended Stanford for his MBA and also holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was named the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His stories and essays appear in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. His story “Swimmer of Yangtze” won the 2018 Guardian 4th Estate Story Prize. He’s a first generation immigrant and despite his travels, he’s still figuring out where home is.
Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the novel A River of Stars and a story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, among others. She has filed stories from China, Burma, South Korea, and elsewhere, and her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has taught most recently at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Books Inc. Palo Alto, 74 Town & Country Village, Palo Alto, United States
USD 0.00
