Debut author Yiming Ma brilliantly, presciently constructs a future when the United States is Qin-America, long subsumed by Qin, a new China able to "crush [Western] enemies once and for all." Mindbanks--"devices... directly installed into the hippocampi"--"made Qin into this great empire."
A "MESSAGE FROM OWNER," its metadata redacted, opens what becomes a novel-in-stories, establishing a framing device in which the unnamed sender introduces his mother's "stories of a world before memories could be shared between strangers... a time when our ancestors shared their thoughts using nothing more than words." Her death bequeaths him her precious, banned collection of "Memory Epics." Risking his own freedom in a time of ubiquitous mind control, he releases "these truths" here because "none of these memories belong to me." Order doesn't matter, he encourages--although he slyly challenges in his final message, "Did you embrace your freedom...? Or did you accept the status quo, the default sequence I determined?"
Some memories are heartbreaking: an elderly mother cooking her son's favorite meal--and arduous faraway delivery she attempts in "First Viral Memory: Chankonabe"; a devoted husband reluctantly selling his beloved, quotidian past with his beloved wife to save her life in "The Islander." Others are gloriously intertwined: two high school friends reunited after war in "Patience and Virtue and Chess and America," their fates further revealed decades later in "After the Bloom"; the recurrence of the armless, eponymous "Swimmer of the Yangtze"; the late mother's own (partial) backstory in "Fantasia." With haunting vulnerability, Ma stupendously creates glimpses of the timeless human need for connection. --Terry Hong