Forever Magazine Issue 3 by David Marusek & Ken MacLeod & Lauren Beukes & Neil Clarke

Author:David Marusek & Ken MacLeod & Lauren Beukes & Neil Clarke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: science fiction magazine, science fiction, short story, novella, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2015-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Originally published in

Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1999.

A Few Words with David Marusek

What was the inspiration for this story?

“The Wedding Album” took a long time to write, even for a dawdling author like me. I worked on it over the course of four years. At one point I took the finished story, ripped out the middle and kept only the beginning and end until I could come up with a better middle. If you added up all the time, I’d say it took me over a year of full-time work to complete. In hindsight, I can say it was well worth the time, as it seems to be my most popular story, is widely translated, and has been reprinted over a dozen times.

The origin of the story was an image of an artificial man who existed in a sort of digital, personal “gallery of memories.” These memories were simulated tableaus of important life events. Think of them as a future form of birthday or wedding videos which you can enter to interact with guests and your former selves. Well, in my story, Ben, the owner of the gallery, has died, and his heirs are looking through the tableaus to see what to keep and what to discard. They come across Ben’s wedding day and a young Ben as the excited, hopeful groom. When they decide to delete the recording and all involved, Ben, who has been in storage since his wedding day, pleads for the honeymoon that he and his new bride never had.

During the years of writing and rewriting, my focus shifted from Ben to his bride, Anne. It became her story. Nevertheless, Ben’s desire for a final shining moment of sweetness served as my polestar through many rewrites. And in the end it’s a story about running out of time.

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