The Sword and Laser discussion

I think it could have enriched the book to have had more exploration of the downsides of Mike's mental superpowers. He talks about the downsides at a few points, but it is all telling, and no showing. We see him do super amazeballs cool stuff with memory and running multidimensional spreadsheets in his head. His ants seem to only pull out relevant items for his perusal. But when it comes to the downsides, we are only told about them.

(view spoiler)["... My mom died my junior year of college, and I was there in the hospital with her. And every single one of them could’ve happened a minute ago. I can tell you what everyone around me said, every thought in my head, every sight and sound and smell. I remember every second of them all dying with perfect, crystal clarity. Everything’s always raw. It’s always ‘too soon.’ ” ... "And now I get to have Bob dying right in front of me every day for the rest of my life." (hide spoiler)]

It seems like a missed opportunity to not have described any one of those scenes, or a montage, or even the summary description we get of (view spoiler)[Cheryl Woodly and her plagiarism confession (hide spoiler)].

With what we do get of Mikes superpowers, I completely and totally want them. Heck, I would take just the memory portions. I've been fighting a problem at work and hitting Google constantly. Google tells me that I've been to some of the same pages X times. Where X is a much higher number than I am comfortable with.


Not directly relevant to The Fold, but I can imagine a completely different character coming out of a different treatment of eidetic memory - I think of someone like Jessica Jones who drinks to try to suppress her normal-human-level memories and extrapolate from there - someone could get trapped in dark memories, desperately trying to break free.

There's a bit at the end of Where'd You Go, Bernadette (not SFF, sorry) where one character relates to another that things might look bleak, but the brain is the world's greatest discounting mechanism - things that seem big now get smoothed out when they become part of your memory. I'm really sympathetic to the idea that Mike's memory could just absolutely bludgeon him with a long-past scene of sadness or terror. Conversely, how distracting would it be to be able to relive in exact detail the best meal you'd ever eaten or something like that? I think I'd be tempted, like Mike, to overload my memories with stuff that was just bland.

I got strong Ponder Stibbons vibes from Clines' description of how the protagonist's memory worked

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_...

Lisa wrote: "
With what we do get of Mikes superpowers, I completely and totally want them. Heck, I would take just the memory portions. ..."

Not if you have to remember things like that. I remember sitting at my Mom's bedside in her last days, but it's like all normal memories, more impressions than a second by second, crystal clear impression of that experience. I don't have a problem with the telling vs showing, either. For anyone who's has a painful, emotionally hard experience, the impact of having it always THERE is easy to understand. I don't really need to see a flashback scene to get the point.

However, this is another reason why the book kind of failed for me. There's no way a human could function if their memories were overlaying their daily reality and if Mike's memory functioned like ours, on demand, then he'd have no real reason to retreat to an anodyne setting to minimize the vividness of memories. I guess what I mean is that, while that memory of Mike's is emotionally wrenching, I don't see why it's disturbing since it will fade into the rest of them as life proceeded.

I kind of wish it was treated more as a superpower than as a normal but absurdly perfect ability to remember things. I find the way his memory works very hard to swallow. The bit where he lay back and watched a movie in his head was particularly dumb. I mean, I can listen to a song I love in my head and more or less ‘hear’ it, perfectly (to give a more realistic example) but that isn’t a match for actually having the vibrations of the music land in your ears!

It would be easier if he would shut up about it too. I find this character incredibly annoying, which would be fine if he wasn’t presented as charming. It isn’t working for me at all.

Ruth (tilltab) Ashworth wrote: "I kind of wish it was treated more as a superpower than as a normal but absurdly perfect ability to remember things. I find the way his memory works very hard to swallow. The bit where he lay back and watched a movie in his head was particularly dumb...."

I dunno, I’ve seen a few people who have similar abilities demonstrate them on camera, and I have no doubt they were telling the truth. The autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire, for instance, can accurately draw entire cities just from flying over them once. His drawings are astonishingly detailed. Even if he’s lying about only seeing a city once — which I don’t believe he is, I take him at his word — but even if he’s studied the cities, his reproduction of the entire area is incredible.

There are so many videos him doing this, where he draws these massive pictures using a pen, without stopping and without sketching, that there is clearly something amazing going on in his brain. Juxtaposing his drawings with photos shows how accurate they are. The fact he make them from memory after a brief helicopter ride or looking out the window of a plane is genuinely remarkable.

I’m guessing Clines based Mike on actress Marilu Henner, who has superior autobiographical memory. She’s said that her memory is like a DVD menu, where she can pick and choose which things she wants to recall at will. The various demonstrations she’s given over the years have been pretty convincing, because they often show photos or video of the event she describes. It’s a bit freaky how accurate she is.

She doesn’t claim perfect recall the way Mike does, but her ability isn’t far off.

I'm not saying people aren't capable of some impressive feats of memory, but the way it is described in the book isn't believable to me. Like, I feel like the artist you mentioned must pay a great deal of attention to the things he paints, even if it isn't a prolonged viewing, that attention would be there. I think I'd suspend disbelief more easily if it was presented in a more 'magical way', even if trying to keep it realistic, like Harry Dresden's 'listening' in the Dresden files books, which is basically human but more focused, merging the lines.

I don’t know, though, maybe the character just irritates me into disbelief. Like, sometimes people mention things I know stuff about in passing, and I'm able to continue the conversation without smugly blurting that information out for no good reason.

Ruth (tilltab) Ashworth wrote: "I'm not saying people aren't capable of some impressive feats of memory, but the way it is described in the book isn't believable to me. Like, I feel like the artist you mentioned must pay a great ..."

I get that. I’m just saying that he’s basically a heightened version of real abilities, which were used as a jumping-off point. Like in the Mary Sue thread, characters like James Bond are based on real events and real people, but Fleming compressed them into one person, which runs the risk of making him a superman. That’s what I think is going on here.

This book isn’t great literature, and — speaking just for myself — I find that when I don’t like a book or movie for whatever reason, its faults are magnified and I get annoyed by them. So I’m not going to gainsay anyone else having that same reaction.

The flipside of that is I’m more forgiving of faults in works I otherwise like, or, in the case of books like this or Ready Player One which aren’t that great but are so earnest about the genre I can give them a pass because they’re inoffensive and the author is clearly such a dork that I don’t hold those faults against them.

From the cases I have seen on TV or read about, most savants have some kind of synesthesia that seem totally absurd to us 'normals'. When they try and describe their thought process it seems impossible to us, but it obviously works.