Thursday, 9 April 2020

False Memories

"The Big Rain," II.

Hollister has gone to Venus as a UN spy or saboteur. He is an Un-man although not a Rostomily Brother. To fool the narcoquiz, he has been given false memories. Consequently, he feels rage, grief and sorrow for fictional friends or family and thinks anti-UN thoughts until he reminds himself that these memories are not genuine.

"The Big Rain" is primarily about physical and political conditions on Venus. However, Hollister's conditioning adds a psychological aspect. Are his false memories, like Dalgetty's enhanced senses, the work of the Psychotechnic Institute? How much would it be possible to do with a science of the human organism? Taking the idea one stage further, false memories might not just fool a narcoquiz but also give the agent a whole invented biography and personality.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And with some thought I could think of ways a dictatorship could use such an instrument for cementing it's grip on power.

Ad astra! Sean