Read in the 80's, title was a year I think

[jnerpel]

The basic plot was a man wakes with no memory, but has a "PDA" watch type device to guide him in recovering his memory. Set in a giant space station orbiting an inhospitable future Earth.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jeremy

 

[monkeypooper]

John Scalzi's old mans war series possibly

 

[jnerpel]

Nope, that is not it. This had more of a detective/mystery feel. I think Earth had been poisoned by some kind of toxic gas. People could have their memories wiped by a surgical procedure...

 

[Metryq]

There's an entire class of stories where "character wakes up with amnesia." It's a well-worn trope. As for a "PDA" helping the character remember his past, the one story that immediately jumps to mind is the Twilight Zone episode "Demon With A Glass Hand" by Harlan Ellison. I'm not big on Ellison; did he ever expand the TZ episode into a novel?

 

[wardenrt66]

This had more of a detective/mystery feel. I think Earth had been poisoned by some kind of toxic gas. People could have their memories wiped by a surgical procedure...

I too am looking for the title/author of this book -- but I remember a few more details.

Main character wakes up with amnesia, finds he's on a giant satellite in Earth orbit. Finds out he's an engineer on the project to build the first interstellar colony ship, and is married with a 12-year old daughter. Except that his daughter died on Earth during her last field trip. Along with everyone else on the planet when the plague hit. The only survivors are on the satellite, and as a morbid hobby you can earthwatch; zoom in on Trafalgar Square and try to count the skeletons ... lots of people get seriously bent under the grief and so memory-wipe parlors have sprung up to provide temporary relief -- they electrically suppress the bad memories for awhile. Main character, it turns out, had stumbled on some conspiracy and the bad guys beat him up & paid a parlor-operator to zapped much harder than normal, after which was dumped in a park.

Main character continues to rediscover what went on, and eventually finds *spoiler* that the lead scientist of the interstellar mission is convinced that Earth was wiped out by God as punishment for humans being evil, and that he is a new Noah, taking his ark and the chosen people to a new promised land ... and that it is his duty to see that the last of the evil humans -- everyone left on the satellite -- perish, and to this end he has brought a sample of the virus from Earth and will release it after the expedition sets off.

My remembrance was reading it in the mid to late 1980s, a typical mass-market paperback, but no one else seems to have heard of it. Did anyone ever figure this one out?