Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins (Source­books Landmark 978-1-72825-603-0, $16.99, 336pp, tp) October 2024. Cover by Erin Fitzsim­mons.

After reading Manuela Draeger’s fascinating novel Kree, about afterlives and reincarnation, and translator and anthologist Anton Hur’s ex­cellent debut novel Toward Eternity, in which artificial intelligences and nanite-transformed humans have found a strange immortality, the centrality of mortality in Eden Robins’s Remem­ber You Will Die is almost refreshing. While there are AI characters here, long-lived ones at that, this is very much a novel about finality and ephemerality. Told almost entirely through obituaries, it’s a frequently funny, frequently poignant book that uses its unusual form to explore connection and character.

It feels like a stretch to talk about Remember You Will Die as having a plot – various charac­ters within wonder if it’s possible to tell stories that are more like fabric, or lace, as defined by holes as by the threads – but it does have a frame that slowly becomes clear. In the near future, an AI, Peregrine, is housed in a partly biologi­cal humanoid body, survives attacks that drive other AIs into hiding, and, using donated organs, gives birth to a human child, Poppy, who later runs away. Remember You Will Die is, essen­tially, Peregrine’s search history, as she combs through obituaries trying to piece together what happened to Poppy and other humans who were important to her. The novel’s obituaries are interspersed with etymologies – Peregrine evidently trying to understand not just what actually happened, but how to talk about it, how to think about it. Each individual obituary is stylistically distinct – some lives are recounted multiple times, and we have to piece together a balanced picture from slanted accounts – and Peregrine’s scope jumps around over many centuries, though the obituaries are clustered around the early 22nd century; part of the draw of the novel, for me at least, is simply piecing together the larger story out of these seemingly disparate lives.

That larger story includes a host of fascinating (if perhaps fairly “stock”) science-fictional ideas: a violent reactionary group that targets AIs, a billionaire-backed Martian colony, and a few glimpses of a nomadic, sail-based culture as the oceans rise. With the exception of those closest to Peregrine, though, most of the characters we read about weren’t especially concerned with technology or planetary change. By giving each chapter the distance of a life that is finished, be­ing reflected on, Robins infuses her stories with the kind of lived-in, unremarkable reality that more traditional science fiction narratives often struggle to impart. These technological develop­ments affected her characters, sure, but no more so than the other cultural and interpersonal factors that one would be inclined to include in a brief biography.

Remember You Will Die is very much a book about connections. Whether thematic or causal, every obituary here is somehow tied to the rest – a chain of friends, lovers, enemies, and family that had me thinking of “The Chart” from The L Word. I found myself entranced, almost ob­stinately, with the extent of the separation many of these characters have: While there’s an inner core of characters who personally interacted with Peregrine and Poppy, there are many more who never knew them, who couldn’t place themselves in this story if asked. The way Robins ties those stories into the larger tapestry is what really fascinated me, the way recurring images, ideas, inventions and architecture connect people who never even know about each other’s existence. It’s a kind of pattern-making that could easily grate on my nerves, but Robins handles it with a careful touch that makes it constantly engaging rather than oppressively saccharine. The novel is chock full of that the kind of “huh!” feeling one gets on discovering some mind-expanding historical coincidence.

A few of the novel’s bigger ideas are not par­ticularly well-served by the format. One plot-minor character is implied to have control over time, for example, which she uses to save Anne Frank, who lives to become a controversial novel­ist – introducing alternate history generally, and Frank specifically, feels like it would take much more room to unpack than it’s given, especially in a novel already contending with strong AI, Mars colonies, human life extension technology, and climate change. Where the novel shines, by contrast, is in Robins’s deep and diverse appre­ciation for the arts, for artists and their entire scenes. Poets, musicians, dancers, sculptors, and performance artists all play major roles, to name just a few. The novel uses well-devised fictional art, including the hippie novel Water Water and the notorious silent film The Courageous Virgin Wilgefortis, as touchpoints for characters across its timeline. I really love how Remember You Will Die pays attention to the unpredictability of artistic legacy – how works impact people un­expectedly, how their effects vanish and reappear over the years – and also to the conditions that create them: the neighborhoods and roommates, the sympathetic venues, the chance encounter that sparks or ends a career.

Any speculative fiction work has to try to impart a sense of reality, and of meaning, to the reader – that, more than some collection of pseudogeographical bobbins, is what we mean by “worldbuilding.” What makes Remember You Will Die work so well is that it leans into the obituary itself as a worldbuilding attempt. This world – and I mean both the novel and our reality – does not make sense; we try to make it make sense, and a person’s death is a specially charged occasion for that endeavor. Robins gives us not a trite secondary world, but Peregrine’s struggle to understand a world – in its randomly broken threads, lives ended too soon, as much as in its wealth of hidden connections. Original and thoughtful, refreshing despite the constant centrality of death, this is highly recommended.

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This review and more like it in the October 2024 issue of Locus.

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