The Wedding Album proves a personal theory of mine regarding one of the ulterior motives of all kinds of fantastic fiction: to provide a platform for the proper and sometimes veiled examination of human madness. For what is this story about if not madness? It is about a time when the need to archive your emotions and your days is taken to an extreme, and when technology, once it has already seen to the basic, and advanced needs of a sufficiently luxurious life, is left in the lurch. With no where to go and nothing more to do, it becomes just another fail safe, but also acts as a mirror for human madness and anxiety. Almost everything can be this, to some extent: animals, for instance, occupy that grey space where human desires, anxieties and exaggerated bouts of emotion play themselves out. So too it is with technology, especially the kind that specializes in deception and illusion. A wedding 'sim', forever stuck on the day of the wedding, grows out of fashion, having heralded an era of technological saturation, which becomes sickening and downright Carroll-ish after a point. The Alice of this tale is Anne, who goes mad shortly after, and her cyber-sim escapes into a wonderland stuck in time, as it were, doomed, or blessed, to repeat the same happy day and emotion day in and out. However, change catches up with the sim too, who realizes before long that even pure unadulterated happiness can repulse after a point. We are merely a string of repetitions in different contexts. The fact that we can stand this fact is thanks to the mind which constantly seeks to smooth over gaps, and rectify a lack of imagination. In hindsight moments and situations feel full of import, when they perhaps really hadn't been. Marusek's fascinating, rewarding novella is, in my reading, a paean to the necessity of memory as it is, without technology as a prop: indefinite, sometimes inconsequential, inaccurate but always aware (as if it was a separate creature) that humans cannot handle reality for very long.
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