Catching Fire came out November 2013.
Mockingjay: Part I came out November 2014.
In between, Mike Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and the Ferguson Uprising took place.
This essay is about what it was like to live in an America that can rapturously and enthusiastically consume and cosplay revolution, and can look on real world resistance with disdain.
In my house, we recognize eight Planet of the Apes movies: the original franchise, and the Serkis trilogy. If you’ve seen all five of the originals, you know I’m already being ethereally gracious. If you haven’t. Buckle up, buttercup.
To begin, no one writes a comparative analysis of PotA movies unless they adore them, but this adoration is most easily understood in the context of the world’s ugliest dog. Someone owns that dog, and all those hideous runners-up. Those someones adore those unfortunate looking creatures—probably because of their ugliness, as much as for any of their other attributes. That is how I love the original set of films. I love Planet of the Apes (1968), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), not because they’re good, but because someone has to. I love them so much, in fact, that every couple of years I re-watch the series and rank them anew.
Set in the glittering art deco world of a century ago, MEM makes one slight alteration to history: a scientist in Montreal discovers a method allowing people to have their memories extracted from their minds, whole and complete. The Mems exist as mirror-images of their source — zombie-like creatures destined to experience that singular memory over and over, until they expire in the cavernous Vault where they are kept.
And then there is Dolores Extract #1, the first Mem capable of creating her own memories. An ageless beauty shrouded in mystery, she is allowed to live on her own, and create her own existence, until one day she is summoned back to the Vault. What happens next is a gorgeously rendered, heart-breaking novel in the vein of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
Bethany Morrow’s debut novel MEM explores profound questions of ownership, and how they relate to identity, memory and history, all in the shadows of Montreal’s now forgotten slave trade. Available May 22nd from The Unnamed Press.
