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The Memory Library
After an unspecified disaster, the future is quiet and analogue. Behind a doorway in the old town, a private library service flourishes. Signed up by the inscrutable Charlie, patrons subscribe to a membership they don’t fully understand. Retro-tainment, existential eavesdropping, or the future of self-help?Whether heartbreak, a rainstorm, or habitual brittleness leads you to The Memory Library, your contributions can be accommodated.‘An ageless, fable-like work of glinting unfamiliarity and mystery. The Memory Library is a glass-like novella humming with internal significance.’ — Jessica Au, Cold Enough For Snow‘A dissociative, contrapuntal sci-fi that’s also a paean to human connection. A novella by turns grounding and soaring that drew me back, after the final page, like a rich and changing memory.’ — Briohny Doyle, Why We Are Here
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978-0-6483988-6-8Research statement
Background Fictional novellas are less common in Australian publishing, although the economy, accessibility and poetic potential of this form make it ripe for original creative research into speculative modes that explore time, aesthetics, uncertainty and shifting subjectivities. Literary novellas thus can test ways of rendering how futures might feel in everyday settings, how future humans will be recognisable/different to themselves, how categories like gender, nation, family will change, how modes of love will prevail after shared catastrophe to supplement sociological, scientific and political research on stability, plasticity, invention and connection. Contribution This work actualises new methods in experimental clifi/speculative fiction with parallel monologues of two nonbinary characters, dual 1st person voices pacing its plot. Its tight focalisation renders existential nuance via otherworldly sensibility/lexicon. Poetic prose disrupts common dystopic world-building showing human modes of ad hoc creative coping, post upheaval. Addressing human foible, loss and social alienation, it explores love-as-decision. Dramatizing therapeutic, addictive and philosophical faces of memory, it stages technology’s impact on recollection, forgetting and invention, depicting new shapes of problem solving and communal meaning-making. Significance Selected for publication by Spineless Wonders Publishing in their inaugural Espresso Series, this work then prompted multi-media works in a dual exhibition/launch at Run Artist Run Gallery. It participated in the competitive Melbourne’s International Film Festival, 37 degrees South Market. It extends the author’s existing research on temporality, weather, poetic form and memory, disseminating complex ideas in an accessible form for mainstream readers. It adds to a still slim body of literary works with nonbinary characters, thus diversifying gender depiction in accessible experimental fiction. Author invited to judge new Australasian novella prize with AAWP.Publisher
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