Rental Partner: Fever presents
Candlelight Concert
The Best of Hans Zimmer
- This event has passed.
Yiming Ma with Tessa Hulls
These Memories Do Not Belong to Us: A Novel
This event has already occurred
EVENT NOTES
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM. Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
Buy the Book
These Memories Do Not Belong to Us: A Constellation Novel
Elliott Bay Book Company
Buy Book
Current technologies make it so easy for us to share all kinds of information on a global scale. What if one day we were able to share and trade our actual memories? Writer Yiming Ma wants to consider this very question in his novel, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us.
In Ma’s book, in a far-off future, China has conquered the U.S. and has created the Qin Empire, where every citizen is fitted with a Mindbank. This intracranial device is capable of recording and transmitting memories between minds. This technology gives birth to Memory Capitalism, where people can buy memories to relive the life experiences of others. This leads to opportunities for manipulation: memories can be edited, marketed, and even corrupted for personal gain.
After the sudden passing of the unnamed narrator’s mother, this main character inherits a collection of banned memories from his mother’s Mindbank, which is so dangerous that even possessing them places the narrator’s freedom in jeopardy. The memories are tales of sumo wrestlers, social activists, armless swimmers, and watchmakers, all struggling amid the backdrop of Qin’s ascent toward global dominance. Determined to release his mother’s memories to the world before they are destroyed forever, the narrator will risk everything – even if the cost is his own life.
Read More
What are the costs of your own memories? Through his storytelling, Ma considers this question and how governments and media work to control the collective imagination – an idea that reflects today’s societal conversations about truth and trust.
Born in Shanghai, Yiming Ma spent a decade in the tech and finance world across New York, Toronto, London, Berlin and South Africa before writing the dystopian novel These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, set in a world where memories are bought and sold. He attended Stanford for his MBA and also holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was named the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His stories and essays appear in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. His story “Swimmer of Yangtze” won the 2018 Guardian 4th Estate Story Prize. He’s a first-generation immigrant, and despite his travels, he’s still figuring out where home is.
Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer, and adventurer who is equally likely to disappear into the backcountry or a research library. Her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, received the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Libby Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She’s pivoting her career to fuse her two great loves of creativity and the wilderness by becoming a comics journalist working with field scientists studying ecological resilience and climate change in remote environments, and she would love to hear from you if you want to partner with her on this endeavor.
Presented by Town Hall Seattle.
Upcoming Events
3 events found.
Rental Partner: Fever presents
Candlelight Concert
Coldplay vs. Imagine Dragons
Rental Partner: KBCS presents
Thom Hartmann with Special Guest Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson
The Last American President