Although science has demonstrated that memories are flexible mental constructions, rather than a stable record of the past preserved in an internal archive, fiction keeps fantasizing about technologies that will locate memories in the brain and edit or download them into an external medium. Anthony Doerr's short story “Memory Wall” (2010) and Meredith Westgate's novel The Shimmering State (2021) continue this preoccupation. They portray treatments for memory‐related diseases that involve downloading memories into a portable medium so that they could be reexperienced, which makes them susceptible to commodification as prosthetic memories. To represent memory, the two texts blend neuroscientific explanations with the traditional conceptualizations of an archive and computer, subverting them in the process. The protagonists' experiences suggest the impossibility of the past's total preservation as a linear archive and explode the neuroscientific view of the self and memory as cerebral properties, highlighting instead the complex interchanges between body, mind, brain, and emotion, involved in the production of memory. A new model of memory informed by prosthetic memories violates privatized interiority and dislodges the temporal coordinates of the past, which leads to the ungrounding of subjectivity. This results in an ontological shift whereby memory is increasingly severed from personal identity.

Western culture tends to separate the notion of phenomenological time (subjective time experienced in individual consciousness) from cosmological time (objective time, accessible through the clock), arguing that they take place on different levels and have no connection. This classic opposition is challenged in two time-travel novels, John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents (2016) and Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself (2015). Untypically of time-travel plots, the two texts explore the relationship between human consciousness and time so as to dismantle and transgress it. While The Lost Time Accidents proposes that there is external time, yet even if we could perceive it, the picture would be tainted by our consciousness, The Thing Itself goes further and proffers—consistently with Immanuel Kant’s ideas, which it enacts—that there is no space or time in the external world; they are instead parts of human consciousness, used to order reality. The novels thus revise the simplistic opposition between phenomenological and cosmological time, advancing the two temporal experiences as two aspects of consciousness of time that complement each other.

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