Book review: a Trace of Memory

A pot-boiler, from the Amnesty bookshop. I confused KL with KR, who wrote the rather lovely Pavane; and having sorted that out I confused KL as author of A Plague of Pythons - which is Poul Anderson - with A Plague of Demons - which my very vague recollection finds similarities to in this work.

The story further has echoes of Glory Road, in that a shiftless man is picked up  by an alien; but I confess the connections are slight.

The plot need not trouble us here I think; we start on Earth, we transition about half way through to the distant planet of Vallon; various things happen; it is all reasonably entertaining and light weight.

A key plot point, which another book would have explored philosophically, is: the aliens have very long physical lives, but every so often, perhaps about every length-of-human-life (bizarre coincidence) they "change": forget everything, and rejuvenate. But! They have tech that allows them to store previous memories, and so re-image themselves and continue where they left off (why, evolutionarily, this would happen is totally ignored). But it turns out that you can be re-imaged into any other person's body; our hero is, in the end. But all of this is used as nothing more than a background plot device as convenient.