My narration of Sunil Patel’s “The Attic of Memories” came out today on StarShipSofa. I just love this story!
Though only one thousand words, it explodes with a multitude of planets and science fiction concepts. In fact,new ones come flying toward you in almost every paragraph. But as with all great stories, this riff on the fantastical is not the point. It is the narrator’s loss of self that is at the heart of Sunil’s story.
The author uses the artificial containment of the narrator’s interstellar memories as a particularly apt metaphor for how we–current, single-stellar humans–package our memories and images on social media. The story, at its core, is about the loss of ownership of self and the transformation of experience into commodity. The question of the story: what is left when you’ve given everything away. You can listen to the entire podcast, StarShipSofa No. 438 here.