Disposable Lit Reviews

Avon, 1991
320 pp.
ISBN 0-380-71015-3

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Beyond its strengths as a well-written novel (as if that weren’t enough), Nancy Kress’s 1990 novel Brainrose is fascinating in the ways in which it’s early 21st century backdrop differs from the future in which we live. The America of 2022 has lived through two huge plagues; one was AIDS, which became such a public health threat that drastic federal anti-gay laws were enacted, and even though the disease has been curtailed, the cultural fallout which has equated homosexuality with something treasonous is still strong, and still erupts in vigilante virus. The second plague is Memory Formation and Retrieval Disorder or MFRD, which traps its sufferers in a short-term memory made permanent, until advanced patients end up reliving a single day over and over before the brain finally shuts down entirely.

This is also a future in which the Gaea Hypothesis has reached full-flower as a religion, one cynically funded by ruthless corporate interests; according to its idealistic and manipulated adherents, Gaea is fully able to compensate for all variations and deviations in the biosphere, fulling including human pollution. Environmental policy has stagnated, because the powerful Gaeist lobby has half-convinced the public that there is no need, as Gaea herself will safeguard her integrity without human second-guessing.

Against this backdrop is the main driving technology of the storyline is a new neurological surgery which can actually open up past lives. Beyond the level of individual memory, there is a common, holographic “over-memory” which stores the totality of human experience, and a relatively simple elective procedure can disable the firewalls between one’s current live and one’s previous lives. The surgery also conveniently cures several other neurological disorders, so the recipients of the surgery are a mix of rich dilettantes seeking their past lives and more serious patients who treat the past life recovery as a side-effect to their cure.

All of which is well and good, but means nothing without believable characters inhabiting this postulated future. Kress has always been one of the premiere character authors in the SF field, and she acquits herself well here, centering the story around three of the patients at the Institute For Previous Life Access Surgery, who spend several weeks acclimatizing themselves to their new memories in residency:

-Caroline Bohentin, a renowned actress with a screwed-up life history, from incest to failed marriages to a daughter institutionalized with MFRD. Her own surgery is an attempt to add context and stability to a life of mistakes and tragedies, which has left her with the thespian skills to recognize insincerity instantly and the cynicism to deploy it.

- Joe McLaren, public policy attorney and member of the Presidential Commission on MFRD. He’s a conservative on most of the social matters of the milieu, and is putting up with the memory recovery only because it will also effect his rescue from multiple sclerosis.

- Bobby Brekke, brash young con man. His motivations for both the surgery and all of his other actions remain deliberately murky; all that is definite about him is his supreme self-confidence, and his sincere shallowness. But somehow, he becomes the crux of a massive shift in the over-memory; just as there is a Gaea hypothesis in the biosphere (very likely bogus, at least in its corporate-backed incarnation), there also appears to be an analogous emergent system within the pool of human memory, one which is threatened by the twin plagues which have decimated the pool of active rememberers…

The novel examines at great length the idea of individual personality when the person in question possesses several pools of disconnected memories; on other questions, such as those that deal with religious faith, it is oddly silent, especially as one of its supporting characters is the Catholic priests who acts as chaplain in residence at the Institute. (The Church has summarily forbidden its members from undertaking the process, as the very idea of multiple lives flies in the face of Catholic theology, but that summary interdiction seems almost a defeatist admission of irrelevancy from the Vatican.) It’s a novel which might take a second reading to understand the conclusion, as Kress is not willing to spell out the implications of the story and risk offending the intelligence of her audience.

I would guess that, given the divergence between the milieu of the novel and the real world of the readership, this book doesn’t have a rosy future ahead of it in successive editions, but it remains both a well-rendered narrative and an intriguing time capsule of extrapolation from its date of composition.