Memories Are Only Valuable if They Can Be Lost: Stories

From Chinese-Canadian award-winning author Ai Jiang comes a masterful debut collection of short fiction that explores both near-future and far-future societies, the fantastical and surreal, the horrific and psychological, found family and those we've lost, generational disparities, the value of language and identity and memories, and more.

Memories Are Only Valuable If They Can Be Lost features 40 works of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy, including the Hugo Award-nominated I AM AI (in production now as a feature film), the Nebula Award-finalist "Give Me English", and many others.

When language itself is used as currency, which words would you give up to survive? Imagine the sound of your best friend's name being forever erased from your Langbase. Or the sound of your parent's names. Or your own... In the Nebula Award and Locus Award-finalist "Give Me English," one young woman faces this unimaginable cost of living.

In the Hugo Award-nominated I AM AI, a young writer struggles to stay relevant in a world where productivity is everything. She undergoes expensive surgical alterations, slowly replacing parts of her biological body with those of machines. More cyborg than human, will the young writer give up the last bit of her humanity to survive?

Within a city where time ceases to flow, a woman steps out into the rain that will bring her closer to death in "We All Fall Down."

To appease the ghosts of dead loved ones, to ensure they aren't lonely in the afterlife, there are many who are willing to pay a great price—quite literally. "A Thousand Forbidden Weddings and a Song for Dead Darlings" follows a young woman on her deathbed who has been sold as a ghost bride.

And those are just four of the imaginative and dark worlds Ai Jiang has built in this expansive debut fiction collection.