Hugin & Munin Journal

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses major plot revelations from Nine Princes in Amber , The Rook , Planescape: Torment , Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic , The Wheel of Time , and The Buried Giant . Fantasy heroes are often required to investigate themselves. They wake in unfamiliar rooms with wounds they cannot explain. They recognise a language they do not remember learning. A stranger calls them by another name, or their hands know how to fight before their minds know why. Somewhere behind the person moving through the story is another life: concealed, stolen, suppressed, or inaccessible. The missing past is useful in obvious ways. It creates mystery, delays exposition, and allows the protagonist to discover the world alongside the reader. Its deeper attraction lies elsewhere. Once a character loses access to their own history, identity can no longer remain an assumption. It becomes a problem the story must examine. An orphan has a missing origin ; an amnesiac has a m...

Spoiler warning: This essay contains major spoilers for Memento , Before I Go to Sleep , Soldier of the Mist , and 50 First Dates . Memory loss in fiction usually points backward. A character wakes without a name or history, and the plot becomes an excavation of the person they used to be. Anterograde amnesia creates the opposite problem: the past may remain partly intact, but new experience cannot reliably become part of an accessible autobiography. The person still has experiences. Conversations happen, decisions are made, relationships change, and consequences accumulate. What fails is the ordinary process by which those events become part of a life story that can later be recalled and revised. Christopher Nolan’s Memento turns this condition into a detective story. Leonard Shelby knows his name, remembers his wife, and understands the world around him. He can reason, speak, and pursue a goal, but he cannot preserve a continuous account of what he has recently learned. He a...

Spoiler warning: This essay contains major spoilers for Remember Me , Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic , Recursion and There Is No Antimemetics Division . Imagine waking with a new memory—not a vague image or uncertain impression, but a complete recollection. You remember a friend betraying you. You remember forgiving someone who never apologised. You remember choosing a career, ending a relationship or committing an act that changed the direction of your life. The memory fits. It explains things. Perhaps it explains them better than the version you held yesterday. Would you know that it had been inserted? Fiction often assumes that an altered memory would feel artificial. The victim notices a seam, experiences a flash of contradiction or senses that something authentic remains buried beneath the replacement. The original past survives somewhere inside, waiting to reassert itself through dreams, bodily reactions or a sufficiently dramatic confrontation. A badly integr...

This essay contains major spoilers for Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium and The Rook. Amnesia in fiction often arrives disguised as freedom. A character wakes without a name or history, apparently released from accumulated decisions. Yet the world has not forgotten. Other people remember promises, betrayals and debts. Bodies preserve addictions, injuries and reflexes. Institutions retain records. The past has vanished only from the place where the character can experience it as their own. Planescape: Torment , Disco Elysium and Daniel O’Malley’s The Rook all begin from this asymmetry. Their protagonists no longer fully identify with the people who created their lives, but they inherit what those people set in motion. That inheritance does not take one form. Harm may create duties of acknowledgment or repair. Broken trust may require evidence of change rather than a declaration of innocence. Information left by a former self may deserve attention without acquiring the authorit...

A human being can lose an arm without losing any obvious part of their consciousness. The same is true of a leg, a kidney or one lung. Machines can also assume selected functions once treated as inseparable from particular organs: a total artificial heart can replace damaged ventricles and valves, extracorporeal support can temporarily provide circulation and gas exchange, and dialysis can remove waste and excess fluid from the blood. Taken far enough, these substitutions invite a disquieting question: how much of the body could disappear before the remaining system stopped being a person? The obvious answer is that the brain must remain. So long as the brain survives, we may be tempted to regard everything else as support equipment—biologically indispensable in ordinary life, but not itself the seat of consciousness. Yet a brain does not simply require oxygen and glucose. It develops and operates within continuous exchange with circulation, respiration, metabolism, hormones, immu...

Science fiction usually presents teleportation as a solution to distance. Yet a machine capable of reconstructing a living human would also be a medical system of extraordinary precision. If it could rebuild the body, why rebuild the cancer with it? Why reproduce an arthritic joint, a damaged heart valve or the accumulated deterioration of old age? Movement might be the least consequential thing such a machine could do. A transporter would require a description detailed enough to reproduce organs, blood vessels, neural connections and whatever physical structures allow memory and personality to continue. That descriptive power would not automatically amount to medical understanding. A machine can copy an abnormality perfectly without knowing whether it is harmful, harmless or necessary. But once the reconstruction process can be compared with genetic information, earlier scans and models of human anatomy, transportation ceases to be a neutral act. The machine no longer merely ask...