Empire State of Mind

Yiming Ma’s debut joins a long tradition of speculative novels that craft an alternative history for the sake of illuminating the present moment. These Memories Do Not Belong to Us is set in a world where a single global superpower, the Qin Empire, has achieved total dominance. Details about the geopolitical situation within or beyond its borders are few and far between. What we do know is that every citizen is fitted with a “Mindbank”— a device “directly installed into the hippocampi” that records experiences with perfect fidelity and can play back the memories of others. Once used by the wealthy to enjoy Memory Epics, an immersive source of education and entertainment, these gadgets have become compulsory tools for surveillance. Under the totalitarian regime, Mindbanks are carefully monitored and Memory Epics are tightly controlled. Experiencing unsanctioned thoughts comes with the risk of arrest or worse. Impressions of dissidence or even nebulously oppositional actions are redacted, censored, or destroyed.

Enter Ma’s unnamed protagonist of an uncertain age, who risks his freedom to upload eleven banned Memory Epics — recorded before, during, and after the war that established the Qin Empire — to an unencrypted cloud where anyone can access them. The book proceeds as a collection of vignettes punctuated by brief missives from the narrator as he reflects on his life, his mother’s legacy, and the files he’s shared — all of which he inherited. “I keep coming back to the question of whether my mother truly meant for me to become a Dissident,” he says, trying to decode why she would put him at risk. “It is a matter of time,” he explains, before his thoughts reach the censors. The reader is positioned as the recipient of these “dangerous” visions and sanguine confessions. We are urged to “embrace your freedom” by exploring the stories in the order of our choosing. We are encouraged to take inspiration from them and, in turn, “find the courage” to share our own opinions. These Memories Do Not Belong to Us aspires to be a rallying cry, to teach us that “resistance can also be necessary for survival.”

What does the opposition lauded by the mysterious narrator look like? For the most part, personal upheaval and small-scale rebellion. Through a variety of capably rendered characters — from an armless swimmer championed during the Cultural Revolution to a “producer” of Memory Epics who is committed to preserving history — we see folks fighting for love, beauty, and autonomy. There are no grand heroes or incredible triumphs in these narratives from a censored past, only different permutations of the mundane melancholy of going against the grain. There is conflict over ideological differences — between lovers, friends, families, and other collectives — but little of what could be called direct political action. We see how “ordinary people” are, as the narrator explains, “unwillingly thrust into their moments of resistance” after the world “had abandoned them, leaving them no choice but to rebel.”

These acts of rebellion never seem to trouble the Qin Empire in any real way. Those who oppose the government rarely benefit from the risks they take. Nonetheless, Ma seems to find hope or something like it in the “feeling of solidarity” that persists through this collection of failed protests. “Whether you are suffering or feeling powerless, you stand with countless others throughout history who faced oppression and fought to hold on to the love and beauty in their lives,” we are told. Regardless of when or where we find ourselves, the narrator insists, we are all in this together.

For all its focus on imagined histories, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us ends up being about the timeless necessity to act against existential threats to truth in the present. Even when such actions fail to achieve tangible or broadly good outcomes, they are worthwhile in themselves and worth sharing with others. It is hard to argue with this. But haven’t we heard it all before?

Ma’s novel is reminiscent of past warnings and calls to arms that we would not, did not, and perhaps could not heed. For well over a century, speculative fiction has cautioned that authoritarian forces will erode personal and collective liberties through the artful manipulation of fact, often by way of science and technology. The genre is rife with stern Orwellian advice to counter autocracy at all costs. Yet despite the efforts of authors like Ma and many before him, we still face the same old threat. We have always been headed in this direction.

Regardless of the specifics of the fictional culture represented in a lot of speculative fiction, we seem complicit with and doomed to despotism of some form or another. Whether the empire is called Qin or American or anything else, totalitarianism trumps democracy. Whether the medium that corrupts fact or distorts reality is called Memory Epics or generative artificial intelligence, we find our grasp of the world troubled and our ability to navigate it fraught. Whether the novel that warns us of the dissolution of freedom is called These Memories Do Not Belong to Us or 1984, society slouches constantly toward fascism.

Authoritarianism always seems to win out, but, as Ma suggests without elaboration, we can still maintain “dreams of a better future.” We can feel connected to others who have fought against oppression for the sake of love or beauty or some other grand abstraction. We can read literature that reiterates lessons from classic science fiction. If this is all we have left, though, we needn’t rely on fictional accounts of dystopias any longer because a very real one has arrived.

The most unnerving aspect of These Memories Do Not Belong to Us has nothing to do with its narrative. Beyond how harrowing it is that human thoughts are commodified and made to serve systems of power, it is much more disturbing that this novel cannot find a way to conceive of a future that differs in kind from the bleak one we have been hurtling toward for some time. The author not only stops short of imagining a world worth fighting for but refuses to offer up much more than warmed-over cliché and vaguely leftist sentiment. Across a series of ironically forgettable tales, Ma gently asserts the value of standing up for what you believe in and leaves us wondering what kind of future awaits if this is the current state of speculative fiction.