The Wedding Album

Love is only science fiction.


With wedding photos and videos and mementos of all kinds, newlyweds attempt to hold on to joys of their special day and to cherish them forever. Someday, technology may enable us to record not only our moving images but everything we know, feel, fear, and love at the moment the shutter clicks. Then our wedding mementos, like Anne and Ben’s in this story, take on a life of their own in a world where love may be eternal, but the world is not. Till deletion do us part . . .


This novella won the Sturgeon Award for best short science fiction.


“It is one of the best SF stories ever written.”  —John Clute, Sci fi Weekly


"The Wedding Album" (1999), one of the stories that solidified his reputation as a writer to watch, is a head-twisting tale about virtual realities and bandwidth scarcity, but the reason the story has legs lies in the couple at the centre of the narrative: a virtual simulation of a pair of newlyweds trapped in a small slice of time and memory like human flies in digital amber. Marusek knows human drama, and writes it so subtly you hardly notice it’s centre stage the whole time, right up until he plucks your heart out.”  —Paul Raven, Strange Horizons


“In ‘The Wedding Album,’ . . . [Marusek] fashions an ominous and surprisingly moving tale about a bride and groom who repeatedly discover, forget and rediscover that they are merely computer-generated re-creations of a flesh-and- blood newlywed couple, fated to watch as their living counterparts, their marriage and civilization itself decay over the centuries.”  —Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review