Title: The Monster’s Million Faces
Author: Rachel Swirsky
Published: tor.com 2010
Genre: Science fiction, near future
Length: 2532 words, short story
Reading time: 20 min
I read this as part of my reading challenge: 25 short stories in 25 days.
It is amazing what you can do with less than 3000 words. This story was very strong. It has me a bit shaken now. The protagonist has been abducted as a child and molested for days. Now he is in theory trying to create a new memory for himself (via technology) to heal the wound in his mind.
False memories do feel as real as real ones to the mind. The same goes for altered memories so if we could transplant new memories into the brain that would probably work very well as a form of theory for emotional trauma. However I can also see so many ways that this tech could be abused! I actually thought that would be the twist of the story, though the ending was more powerful than that.
I think it might be good that I got Jim Hines’ Codex Born to read after this to lighten the mood.
After reading All That Fairy Tale Crap by Rachel Swirsky in Glitter & Mayhem I was expecting something rather light and perhaps meta-fictional or postmodern, but that definitely was not what I got. But I think what I got was better than that and I do hope to read more by her in the future since both stories was very satisfying.