Rediscovery

A review of Liz Strange’s “Erased” (Dark Continents Publishing, 2014)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Liz Strange’s “Erased” is an intersection of stories of loss and secrecy. Set in the future in a world with the capacity to erase a person’s memory with one needle stroke, “Erased” opens with character Grey Singer who has woken uncertain of her identity, her selfhood, or any markers of the person she once was. She finds identification hidden in the seams of her clothing, but it is the identification of several different people, all with her face, further complicating the question of her identity.

Singer is able to discover that she was part of covert activities, and her search for her own memory is complicated by the secrecy that she shaped around her life. This intertwining of uncertainties is made more complicated by the fact that the act of recovering her memories itself comes with a price – the potential that trying to push herself to discover more can cause a repeat of the memory loss and put her in the position of having to re-discover herself from scratch once again. Singer is in a state of perpetual discovery of her identity and perpetual loss… but the new her is someone who she may be more comfortable with anyway. The new her doesn’t have all of the barriers that are raised by trying to block herself from caring, and the new her is capable of letting down her barriers enough to love.

The only problem is that because of the secrecy her previous job required, she is now left uncertain who to trust since neither her own memories nor her records hold any keys about which people around her are safe for her to become comfortable around

Lis Strange puts readers into the position of questioning their notions of loss and considering the idea that memories may not make up everything about a person. She invites readers to explore their own engagement with the notion of memory and our social fear of the loss of memory. She plays with ideas of uncertainty, and, particularly uncertainties around identity in order to put her reader into a position of mystery, shaping the overall spy-fi story around a general feeling of curiosity.

You can discover more about the work of Liz Strange on her website at http://www.lizstrange.com