Donald Maass Literary Agency

Wall Street Journal: A peculiarity of American fiction is that it is filled with visions of the apocalypse yet lacking in explorations into the experience of death. Writers can imagine the end as a collective catastrophe but rarely as something intimate and individual. A clever, genre-blending book by Eden Robins, “Remember You Will Die” illustrates the paradox. The novel is written as a collection of obituaries of deceased characters from the distant past to the speculative future. Its title derives from the ancient Roman custom of employing slaves to remind triumphant generals of their mortality. Yet the ultimate impression is one of continuity and perpetuation. It’s real interest is in the ingenious ways that humans try to erase death. The novel’s many obituaries—some written in the standard newspaper template, some more informally—hopscotch across time periods, projecting as far ahead as the 22nd century. Gradually the passages create a mosaic of future pandemics and climate crises, as well as of controversial new developments in artificial life and interplanetary colonization. One story outlines the adventures of an outlaw artificial intelligence called Peregrine who, through a process of “in-vitro gametogenesis,” bears a human child. The obituaries dwell on the innovators of these death-defying advances or on avant-garde artists—or both at once, such as Aristotle Williams, a sculptor who invented Peregrine’s “neo-skin.” “Art is emergent, art is a living thing,” declares the maker of huge art installations involving nature. The persistent idea in this book is that life and art are conjoined creative ventures driven by an opposition to death—and often, as in the case of the poppy flower, which flourished on World War I battlefields, growing out of death’s physical residue.  Poppies are one of many recurring motifs in this wild, exfoliating book, which jumps around so frantically and contains so many intertextual references that readers will need to take notes to have any chance of keeping up. Ms. Robins has clearly enjoyed herself designing this vast network of connections, which often resembles the art installations it commemorates, full of patterns and puzzles and messages. Its excess and energy make it less a memento mori than a reminder, spelled out in boldface, of the remarkable tenacity of life.