Exclusive: Nicholas Binge's new thriller was inspired by real-life memory loss
Behind the book: 'Dissolution,' a new science fiction novel about memory and technology from the author of 'Ascension.'
In the 1990s, I fell in love with books for two reasons: the Myst franchise and the science fiction thrillers of Michael Crichton.
Nicholas Binge shares at least one of those reasons. “I think I was in my teens when I first read Michael Crichton and something just clicked,” he tells me. “For a while, I didn’t want to read anything else.”
Two years ago, Binge’s US debut, Ascension, was about a team of scientists sent to explore a massive mountain that appears in the middle of the Pacific Ocean overnight. Ascension earned rave reviews — including this praise in The New York Times from
— and I devoured it in 48 hours with the same fervor I experienced reading Crichton’s Sphere for the first time. Binge has a propulsive prose style and a great talent for structure and pacing alongside his high-concept ideas.Today, his next novel hits shelves — Dissolution, about an elderly woman who tries to save her husband’s memories from being stolen. I won’t say anything more than that, as one of the book’s greatest joys is discovering what’s actually happening and why. I picked Dissolution as one of Esquire’s most anticipated books of 2025, and it did not disappoint.
Binge lives in Edinburgh, where he lectures in creative writing at Edinburgh Napier University and is co-host of the Binge Reading Book Club podcast. Dissolution is already being adapted by the screenwriter of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, while Binge’s next novel, Extremity, a pulpy police procedural at the end of the world, is set for November. For The Frontlist, we spoke about how Dissolution came to be.
Did you grow up reading science fiction thrillers? What drew you to the genre as a writer?
The first book I remember really engaging with was The Lord of the Rings, which I probably read too young to fully get it, but it absolutely captured my imagination. Cue a slew of classic fantasy fiction over the next few years that I picked out myself from school libraries and charity bookshops. At the same time, my dad was feeding me a steady diet of golden age science-fiction: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and then onto Philip K Dick.
I think I was in my teens when I first read Michael Crichton and something just clicked — the bold, inventive speculative concept mixed with the pacing and twists of an unputdownable thriller? For a while, I didn’t want to read anything else.
Speculative fiction has always been part of my identity, of the way I see the world, and I’m so happy to have joined that playground and get to play with my own crazy ideas.
What drew you to memory as a concept for a sci-fi thriller?
I’ve watched two of my grandparents (on different sides of the family) succumb to dementia and memory loss. Over time, two things really stuck out to me. The first was seeing the way in which my Gran didn’t just lose her memories, but her entire identity. It was less that she couldn’t recognize her family, but more that she no longer exhibited the traits and behaviours that made her uniquely her. I found that terrifying — the idea that your identity could be scooped out of your body in that way — and it has haunted me ever since.
The second pivotal moment came with my Grannie on the other side, and the impact her illness had on my Grandpa. They’d been together for decades and had the most loving relationship, but watching the emotional toll that caring for her took was heartbreaking. Though physically taxing to a man in his mid-nineties, it was never an option for him to have someone else take care of her. She was no longer the woman he married, and yet, there was the constant and persistent hope that she might return to him. Seeing this mixture of duty, hope, and guilt that he couldn’t do more to help her was tragic. It left me with so many feelings that I wanted to explore about the human capacity for love in the face of tragedy, and how we can salvage hope in situations that feel inevitable. This was the start of my deep dive into memory.
I’ve read a lot about memory over the years — from academic studies into memory formation and distortion to more personal accounts of memory loss or, on the other end of the scale, extreme memory “athletes” who push their memories as far as they can take them. Some of the more horror-inspired moments in the book are literalisations of the horrors associated with losing your memories and how destabilizing that must be.
I suppose I’ve always been fascinated by memory: its unreliability, the ways we construct and reconstruct it, and the way we rely on it to create our identities and realities. There’s a baked-in contradiction there — we recognize our memories are subjective and yet they’re often all we have to build the objective realities we live in. This is the basis of the novel’s technological intrigue: if you could explore someone else’s memory of events, what would it do to your reality? How would that change? Once I started down that path, everything started falling into place.
Why did you open this book with an interview transcript? What made that the right move, form-wise?
There are a variety of post-hoc reasons that I could point to that made a lot of sense to me once I’d finished the book: for a book about memory, it makes sense for the narrative to be a type of forced recollection; I love the immediacy it brings to the narrative and the way the interrogative structure builds an implicit tension between characters, and a sense of distrust between what we’re being told and what we’re seeing elsewhere.
But my process is so nebulous and subconscious, and if I’m being honest, when I started writing the book in that format, I had no idea exactly why I was doing it other than it felt like an interesting narrative challenge. I find this happens a lot in my writing: something subconscious in my brain will want to tell a story in a particular way, but I won’t be able to consciously identify why until I’m near the end of the book.
There are some specific structural elements I intended from the beginning though: the “dissolution” countdown is meant to approximately match the average reading speed of a book, creating an eerie verisimilitude, which I always strive for in my work.
Where did you write most of this book, and why?
I’m a very nomadic writer. I don’t have one specific place. Bits get written on the sofa, in cafes, in bed. Years ago I set up a fancy writing desk for myself that I bought from an antique shop in Edinburgh and made it look all sophisticated and I... just never ended up writing at it. Wherever I have a laptop and am comfortable, that’s where writing happens.
Recently, I've been going full Trumbo and writing in the bath, which is just a delightful experience. Though it's worth mentioning that I think a lot of the “writing” of this book happens when I'm away from the keyboard. One of my favourite things to do is move my body — whether on a long walk or a session at the gym — because it allows my mind to run free, and those are usually the times when the ideas and scenes coalesce in my head. When I sit down to write, I’m just transcribing the work I did when I was out moving.
What was the hardest part about writing Dissolution?
Honestly, some of the structural and technical aspects of the way the story is told and holding that timeline together in my head. I’m not a very visual person, so graphing timelines and using post-it notes and all the other things some other writers do just doesn’t work for me. I have to be able to hold the whole thing in my brain, and with Dissolution that was tricky at points.
It also caused stumbling blocks in some basic elements of the prose. Due to the structure of the narrative, with characters recalling events of them diving into other people’s memories, it was easy to lose my place in the POV and which pronouns I’m talking about.
There’s a chapter where my main character, Maggie, is recalling an event where she dived into her husband’s memory of a much earlier event, where she saw herself meeting her younger husband for the first time and is comparing it to her own memory of that moment… Do I use she, or you, or I? Do I use past or present? Oh, she’s recounting this to an interviewer in the second person, too. I don’t know why I do this to myself.
The real truth is never happy unless the book feels like a bit of a stretch: thematically, narratively, structurally. It’s how I learn and grow as a writer, and it’s the challenge that makes the end result worth it.
As a sci-fi writer, you spend more time than most people thinking about the future. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the next 50 years?
On the surface, there’s so much to be pessimistic about: the climate crisis, the increasing grip of late-stage capitalism, the isolation of human beings behind screens and the manipulation by big tech companies. I have two wonderful children and it is hard to look at the world they're entering into and not feel a sense of despair. But part of the reason that I write is that I have an unshakable faith in the audacity and strength of the human spirit.
We are supremely adaptable creatures (which is not always a good thing! Ask the frog in the boiling pot about the merits of adaptability!) but we’re also furiously stubborn and wildly inventive. If nothing else, I have to have faith that the next generation will find a path through, and the way we do that is by telling stories, by sharing experiences, by building and rebuilding communities. Fiction is such a huge part of that, and it’s part of why I write.
Forthcoming in The Frontlist
Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press, March 18)
Behind the book with Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, April 8)
April book preview