Book details of 'Memory (Vorkosigan Saga/Bujold, Lois McMaster)'

Title	Memory (Vorkosigan Saga/Bujold, Lois McMaster)
Author(s)	Lois McMaster Bujold
ISBN	0671877437
Language	English
Published	October 1996
Publisher	Pocket Star

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Memory (Vorkosigan Saga/Bujold, Lois McMaster)':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Miles turns 30, and--though he isn't slowing down just yet--he is starting to lose interest in the game of Wall: the one where he tries to climb the wall, fails, gets up, and tries again. Having finally reached a point in his life where he can look back and realize that he has managed to prove his courage and competence, he can move on to bigger and better things. Depending on how you count it, this is the eighth, ninth, tenth, or eleventh book in a series--not all are about Miles or even his extended family. A good place to start is with the first Vorkosigan story, Shards of Honor. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Bujold's books, and particularly her "Vorkosigan" series, are a delight to read. While sometimes politically complex, they are socially simple, with well defined good guys and bad guys. Humour, mostly ironic, is abundant. There are enough plot twists to keep you turning the pages, but there are also clues enough to keep you guessing at the development, with little use of the "deus ex machina" to get the author out of a hole. As with any good series, there are similarities enough between books to make the reader feel comfortable. The main technology of this particular book is the "memory" of the title. This is a brain implant that augments the memory of the bearer, recording input and playing it back, providing the carrier with an artificially eidetic memory. The psychological aspects of such a device are nicely examined: the likely confusion of learning to control an additional memory, better than one's own, and the difficulty of learning to live "impaired" again once it is taken away. The technology of the chip itself is not dealt with in great detail, of course, but there are some interesting points. The chip (actually more of a large scale multichip module) is made of a combination of organic and inorganic parts. One assumes that this description reflects the current interest in biotechnology, and a frequently made speculation that organic computers will be better than the current silicon beasts. In fact, while organic computers may be able to perform parallel calculations, they are probably ill-suited to data storage. DNA-like structures can store a lot of data very compactly, but the writing, and particularly retrieval, of the information probably would not be very fast. Indeed, the total volume of such storage would have to be immense. Thirty years worth of full motion, wide field, high resolution "video," plus audio and tactile, would make for an awful lot of bits. Quantum memory might be more suitable. Or something else entirely. Which brings up an interesting point to do with most science fiction: it's too tame. The series is set in the far future when colonies have not only been set up on distant planets, for generations, but when some of these colonies have been "lost" for a while before being found again. Yet the "comconsoles" seem to bear a remarkable resemblance to desktop PCs. Pocketbook sized reminder devices are only smart enough to recognize speech and do a little filing. Surely by this time such simple machines should have shrunk sufficiently to be woven into clothing, or even to be injected internally. (Which makes the need for a memory implant a little more problematic.) Boxes of pills can be flagged for inventory, but the individual pills can't. (We have, in our own day, tracking and inventory devices only about the size of a legible letter. We also have the beginnings of technologies that will be able to track *all* movements in high security environments, and identify individuals.) copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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