To be momentarily anecdotal; I've been reading Edward Ashton's Mickey 7 and it's a fine book (the arrogance of all of the cast so effectively written it's been encouraging me to put it off of my own irritability), but its greatest strength is that it bakes its stance on a popular debate in science fiction into its premise insofar that it puts it to rest. This debate, based off of Star Trek's Transporter, asks if, upon using a teleporter that operates by displacing your atoms on entry and reconstitutes you - otherwise unchanged - on the receiving end with new atoms, you would still assertively be you. Mickey 7 assertively quells the, perhaps not bioessentialist but instead, atomiessentialist arguments such a debate would raise in having its eponymous protagonist die and be resurrected repeatedly, via perfect clones of himself (hence the number in the title) that retain all of his memories. The problem of his individual person's integrity only arises when more than one clone is alive at a time, but that is beside the point of why a story like Forgotten Lives was so effective on me. We are all the sums of our memories, they are what utterly defines us and thus, conditions that lead us to forget like Alzheimer's and dementia are perhaps the greatest fear any one person could have. Quite literally within the narrative, via the Evolved, we see characters become entirely different people, their minds swapped in a visceral kind of body horror that the Evolved treat not just as a fact of life, but as something to be proud of. The story broaches the inhumanity of dementia, and the potential misdemeanour of dementia care, with a cutting panache. Myle's performance is staggering; Gwen is placed in a distinctly reactionary position, the only character in the story not to have her mind separated from her, a control as it were to show why humanity is incompatible with the Evolved's sinister "gift." In this tragic horror, no stones are left unturned when it comes to Gwen's relationships, one of the most tragic existing with Jack - who is at his most aspirationally 'Doctorish,' leaving Gwen in suspense for years about his whereabouts, only to be (quite literally) changed upon his return, where he only weaves further tragedy in his wake. It is hardly exempt from any levity, an inevitability when Kai Owen is involved, but the intimate execution of an inexorably horrific conceit places this among one of the all-time greats. The first story in the range which probably requires decent, and very existential, forewarning.