Well-informed protagonists with excellent memories can be inconvenient. They can reveal all to readers at inopportune moments.1 If they already know what they need to know, they’re not going to search hither and yon for missing clues and information (and the author is going to have find some other way to bulk up the novel). That’s why so many authors choose a handy cure-all: amnesia. There’s nothing like amnesia to drive a plot and fill up a book.
Here are five rather memorable examples.
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny (1970)
Carl Corey wakes in Greenwood, an unfamiliar hospital. He has no idea how he got there. Indeed, thanks to his amnesia, he has only the staff’s word that he is “Carl Corey” and not, to pick a name entirely at random, Corwin of Amber. Some applied violence later and the curiously untrusting Carl Corey learns the name of the benefactor paying for his stay at the hospital: his sister, Evelyn Flaumel.
Escaping the hospital, he confronts the woman in question, who turns out to be no more Evelyn Flaumel than he is Carl Corey. She is, however, his sister. In fact, Corwin has a number of siblings, a Machiavellian litter imbued with powers unknown on the Earth on which Corwin woke, many of whom are rivals for the otherworldly Crown of Amber and some of whom might, if they knew he had escaped Greenwood’s comfortable oubliette, simply kill him.
***
The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee (1975)
Centuries after a great people fell from power, an amnesiac wakes, haunted by a mysterious voice, aware that to remove their mask is to reveal a face that can freeze beholders in place. Venturing out into an unfamiliar world, they find the descendants of former slaves. Some believe the masked figure to be a god returned. Other accept that the amnesiac has genuine power, but see the awakened one only as an asset to use for their own ends. The amnesiac reinvents themselves over and over, adapting as conditions change. Those who seek to exploit this echo of a long-vanished age? They have less inspirational fates.
***
Shadow by K. J. Parker (2002)
A lone survivor wakes on corpse-littered battlefield. Around him lie the remains of two armies—but it’s not clear to which one of them he belonged, if indeed he was a combatant at all. His clothes give no hint; his memories are no help, because (as you might expect from inclusion on this list) the survivor has no idea who he is.
Once he wanders from the battlefield, he encounters people who do know who he is. They want him dead. All he learns from them is that to know him is to be driven to homicidal fury…and the fact that he’s a preternaturally skilled killer.
Belatedly conscious that he must have been an unpleasant fellow before he lost his memories, the survivor vows to do better. Perhaps he used to be a villain, but now he will be a hero.
And you know to what destination good intentions lead.
***
Cold-Forged Flame by Marie Brennan (2016)
The swordswoman finds herself in the warrior’s version of the actor’s nightmare, with no idea who or what she might be, despite which she is magically compelled to perform an arduous quest for reasons unclear. The one certainty: she must collect blood from the cauldron of the Lhian. Who this Lhian might be and what views they might have about blood being collected from their cauldron—both are unknown. The revelation that most of the people who try to win a prize from the Lhian never return is cold comfort.
***
The True Queen by Zen Cho (2019)
Arriving in a tumultuous storm, Sakti and Muna know their names but nothing of their past. The pair are so similar that the Janda Baik islanders assume they must be sisters. Offered a home by formidable witch Mak Genggang, the pair start new lives. One small complication: the sisters are both cursed: where Sakti is full of magic, Muna has not a jot. Sakti’s curse is more existential: she is progressively vanishing. Perhaps the
English Sorceress Royal’s college for magically gifted women can help…
It’s convenient that, even though the English are her enemies, the Sorceress Royal is a friend of Mak Genggang. It’s less convenient that Sakti vanishes while the sisters are traversing Faerie to reach England.
It is up to powerless Muna to rescue Sakti. If only Muna were not utterly powerless. If only Faerie were not on the verge of declaring war on England.
***
No doubt there are examples I could have used but did not. I plead memory lapse. Do feel free to remind me in comments of the works I forgot.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]“Wait, aren’t characters entirely under their author’s control?” Mileage varies on this point. Many authors experience their characters as disconcertingly autonomous.
The Rook by Daniel O’Malley! Fabulous urban fantasy where the protag wakes up to find herself a senior member of a secret organisation of people with supernatural powers, also someone trying to kill her. Aided by a) notes from her previous self who knew it was coming and b) her reboot, this time without years of childhood trauma holding her back. Great worldbuilding, very funny too.
Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of the Mist.
Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle.
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
“The End of Summer” by Algis Budrys. A novelette rather than a novel, but the amnesia is very much integral to the plot rather than just being a narrative convenience
The Man Who Melted by Jack Dann.
Funny that someone mentioned Gene Wolfe, since he also challenged this article’s intro with a hero who has perfect memory, in The Book of the New Sun.
@Cecrowa
It’s very Wolfian to have an unreliable narrator with a perfect memory— and the story gets told.
Kidd, the protagonist of Samuel Delany’ sprawling Dhalgren, has some memory issues also.
The Miles plot line in Bujold’s Mirror Dance.
@7: Severian claims to have an eidetic memory. It is possible that he believes that. It is clear that he does not.
John Carter of Mars is an amnesiac, but he’s been one for a long time and doesn’t worry about it any more. In his own words:
I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty.
Zelazny went back to the amnesia well with Lord of Light. I don’t remember (snrk) about Creatures of Light and Darkness.
I really enjoyed Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox, which is a near-future SF YA novel about a young woman who (ostensibly) wakes up with a badly damaged memory after a terrible car accident. I need to get to the sequels!
P. C. Hodgell’s <i>God Stalker Chronicles</i> makes much use of this trope.
I’m as woke as the next person, but that paragraph is really almost indecipherable. ‘They’ doesn’t work nearly as well as people would like to think it does.
TIm @14 Lord of Light (1967) was Zelazny’s first round at the amnesia well. He went back to it for Nine Princes in Amber (1970j.
Curse my faulty memory for not letting go of this one: Politician (Bio of a Space Tyrant: 3) by Piers Anthony uses as a framing story an amnesiac slowly remembering (thanks to clues he left himself).
A pal of mine once told me that the opening of Nine Princes in Amber was lifted from a Raymond Chandler story. I never read enough Chandler to learn which story, though, and I don’t know if this is true. Maybe I misinterpreted my friend?
14, Tim: Zelazny also plays with a deliberately-induced form of amnesia in Today We Choose Faces (1973).
[SPOILER]
The protagonist has edited his memories, and in the course of the plot, finds it necessary to restore a previous (unpleasant) version of his personality from a sort of computer.
Memorable blurb: “‘Pull pin seven and loose the demon within…“
Matthew Hughes’ A God in Chains has a protagonist who spends most of the book trying to regain his memories. I read this in a day, a very enjoyable book.
Just the “Nine Princes in Amber” for me.
What, no “All My Sins Remembered” by Joe Haldeman ?
https://www.amazon.com/All-Sins-Remembered-Joe-Haldeman/dp/0380393212/
I have always been a total sucker for amnesiac storylines
How about Hull Zero 3 by Greg Bear?
“Creature of Havoc” in the Fighting Fantasy series always stuck with me (notwithstanding the misprint in the version I borrowed as a kid from my local library, which frustratingly made it impossible to progress).
Stephen Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts.
Octavia Butler, Fledgling
Beginning with Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (#5 in the series), in almost every subsequent book at some point Tarzan gets bonked on the head and immediately loses his memory, or somebody else gets bonked on the head and immediately loses his memory and believes he’s Tarzan, or sometimes both at once.
Chandler does use the bit about waking up in a private hospital and busting out in “The Man Who Liked Dogs”, later recycled into Farewell, My Lovely. But there’s no amnesia there, just the aftereffects of a black-jack and some drugs.
@26 – The Raw Shark Texts doesn’t get enough love, to my mind.
“The Day Before Forever” by Keith Laumer, although the actual situation is a bit more complex than simple amnesia.
Also Silverberg’s “How It Was When The Past Went Away”.
I loved O’Malley’s The Rook! Outstanding! (and not for this set of books, but the sequel wasn’t bad either. I would totally read anything else in this world.)
Imajica by Clive Barker features an amnesiac character.
Not a full novel, but Calvin and Hobbes had a storyline concerning Calvin getting “amnesia” starting here.
If we’re bringing in graphics, maybe there should also be mention of “Demon with a Glass Hand”, an early (and award-winning) Harlan Ellison script (for The Outer Limits) in which Robert Culp is stuck in an abandoned building with hostile aliens and a plastic half-hand that tells him his memory is in the missing fingers
@@@@@ 36, CHip:
If we’re bringing in graphics, maybe there should also be mention of “Demon with a Glass Hand”, an early (and award-winning) Harlan Ellison script (for The Outer Limits) in which Robert Culp is stuck in an abandoned building with hostile aliens and a plastic half-hand that tells him his memory is in the missing fingers
Not to be confused with The Abominable History of the Man with the Copper Fingers, a Peter Wimsey story. It involves a scientific horror; not a science fiction one.
The “amnesiac protagonist” is over-used in computer games (and a lot of other fiction), because it makes it easier to explain things to the player about the world without as much overly clunky “as you know, your father, the king”-type dialogue.
I really enjoyed The Rook by Daniel O’Malley. It was a great use of “I woke and don’t know who I am” trope.
I think I called The Rook “Actor’s Nightmare with added firearms.”
Broken link to the Pratchett article led me here. I loved Shadow by K.J. Parker. It made me buy the rest of the books in the Scavenger trilogy. Also got the Engineer trilogy as well as the Fencer trilogy. The other books him are in my TBR pile.
I read this list curious to see if you would include Gene Wolfe’s Soldier in the Mist – since you did not, I suppose you have answered your own question, and he has become less well-known. :(
One of the major characters in Tad Williams’ amazing Otherland series is an amnesiac. He’s the very first character we meet, in fact.
Total Recall by Philip K. Dick.
Memory Blank by John Stith is very good. It has a feel like a survival challenge designed by Roger Zelazny and Desmond Bagley.
The main character in Mira Grant’s Parasite wakes up with vanished memories after a car accident.
While I understand not giving Zelazny two spaces on the list, I think Creatures of Light and Darkness is worth a mention.
Devon Monk’s Allie Beckstrom series, particularly the first novel, has one of the best uses of amnesia (and a character dealing with recurring holes in her memory) that I’ve ever read.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes… there’s more than just amnesia involved, but the looming threat of the book is the central character forgetting who he is.
James H. Schmidt wrote a short story called The Planet of Forgetting. Which Eric Flint rewrote as a Heslet Quillan story called Forget It. The meat of the tale is unchanged. It involved a telepathic creature who responds to external threat by projected amnesia.
At best, Major Heslet Quillan decided, giving his mud-caked boot tips a brooding scowl, amnesia would be an annoying experience. But to find oneself, as he had just done, sitting on the rocky hillside of an unfamiliar world which showed no sign of human habitation, with one’s think-tank seemingly in good general working order but with no idea of how one had got there, was more than annoying. It could be fatal.
In other genres, there’s The Bourne Identity.
@50, I love James H. Schmitz. I just read his Planet of Forgetting on-line. Lovely twist with the damsel in distress. Must have startled reader’s back when who thought they knew how it was supposed to go.
I haven’t commented on a blog post in 10 years, but leaving Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, unmentioned here would be a crime.
A.E. Van Vogt did it in _The World of Null-A_, in which not only doesn’t Gilbert Gosseyn know anything about his true history (the few memories he has are quickly shown to be false), but neither does anyone else know exactly who he is or why he’s shown up at the crucial portion of the Games.