I've always liked those novels or movies that flirt with a science fiction argument completely embedded in a recognizable world.
And on this occasion the story has the double appeal of focusing as a crime novel, with added suspense regarding the sinister enigma of murder and the dark shadow of a world readjusted to an imaginary that makes it take off towards new approaches.
The game of memory opens us to the assumption of our world exposed to oblivion, and from there to knowledge, to the knowledge of those who are capable of remembering more than others, turning these into a social stratum of greater value that ends up rising by above the mediocrity that barely remembers who he is after each awakening.
In this scenario, you can guess that the killer's margin is much higher. Well, sooner or later everything can be relegated to oblivion, to the disturbing erasure of human memory.
Claire's short-lived and Mark's marriage, capable of evoking a fuller past, resembles an interracial union in the harshest times of colonial racism, despite a certain degree of acceptance associated with Mark's higher status. But they survive the repudiation and misunderstanding in that day to day looking into an abyss without a past.
Until a woman appears dead in a river and the researcher Hans Richardson ends up tying up and writing down the necessary ropes so as not to forget his research and to focus his research on Mark.
And that's where the black genre and science fiction come together with successful results. In the manner of a script by Memento, the criminal skills of a budding writer Mark are beginning to be glimpsed between that play of light and shadow that the circumstances themselves mark.
From the knot and the resolution of the novel, aspects can be drawn for meditation on the importance of our past to configure our identity and the expected twist that science fiction always facilitates for the great final surprise.
You can now buy the novel The Memory Game, by Felicia Yap, here: