Preset by Sarina Dahlan is a sobering exploration of memory, loss, and disconnection

Author Sarina Dahlan’s 2021 debut novel Reset was a literary science fiction story that asked the question: can you still love someone you can’t remember? In the Four Cities, people’s memories are wiped every four years in order to preserve the peace and prosperity of their seemingly utopian society. But what if people want to remember? Or what if they can’t forget?

These kinds of questions lie at the center of Preset, the follow-up to Reset. Set decades earlier, Preset is a prequel novel which explores how the memory wipe system and the Four Cities came to exist. Read on for our spoiler-free review.

Book review: PRESET by Sarina Dahlan (The Four Cities #2)

In Sarina Dahlan’s Reset, we were introduced to The Four Cities: the last remaining human civilization on Earth following a nuclear war. In order to preserve the peace, everyone living there has their memories “reset” every four years, the idea being that attachments are what lead to things like war and violence in the first place. Reset was about a married couple forced to forget their time together, and their journey to remembrance.

Preset shows us how the Four Cities came about, as seen by two characters named Eli and Eleanor. As in Reset, these two main characters are inextricably intertwined. However, their story is far more complex and difficult; it is the story of two people drifting apart emotionally and ideologically without being able to truly let go of one another. Eli and Eleanor each get a solid amount of development; they feel like real, flawed people making compromised decisions. You probably won’t agree with their choices — especially in the case of Eli, the mastermind behind the Four Cities — but you’ll understand why they’re making them.

While Preset is technically the second book in Sarina Dahlan’s The Four Cities series, it’s very readable whether you’ve read the first book or not. That said, there are plentiful ties between Preset and Reset, and one of the highlights of reading this book for me was seeing how the various systems present in Reset came about.

Some of these connections are pretty straight-forward. We see how certain characters ended up in the positions we hear about in Reset; for instance, we learn how Eli becomes “The Planner,” a name he is known by in future generations. At other times, Dahlan expertly subverts expectations. I won’t get into details surrounding some of the novel’s bigger twists, but suffice it to say they completely reframe the book in a way that makes me eager to re-read it.

Preset is a sobering exploration of memory, loss, and disconnection between those in power and those they serve

Dahlan’s writing is at its strongest when she’s exploring thought-provoking ideas, fleshing out her settings with vivid descriptions, or mulling on the human experience. Some aspects of the prose on the smaller scale are slightly awkward at times, especially in certain bits of dialogue. Fortunately, that doesn’t detract from the larger whole; the story often wanders into the philosophical territory, which is where it sings.

Preset is almost more reminiscent of classic works from authors like Ray Bradbury rather than your more typical voice-driven modern sci-fi. Science fiction is often about the human experience; Preset keeps that front and center as characters adapt to life on Earth following an apocalyptic war. There are deeply personal stakes for Eleanor and Eli, but the book also loves to ask big-picture questions about what sorts of effects these events would have on human beings and their societies. At times, the answers to those questions are pretty terrifying.

Another thing that makes Preset so resonant is how well it reflects shades of our own time. Eli is in many ways a quintessential tech bro, who just so happens to find himself saddled with the burden of preserving humanity after the apocalypse. In a time when we have plenty of these guys disrupting our lives — from AI inundating the publishing industry to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter — it’s sobering to imagine what sorts of outlandish solutions a person like that might come up with when trying to deal with humanity’s extinction. As Eleanor puts it when asked whether Eli cares about human life: “He cares about the fate of humanity. They’re not the same thing.”

Verdict

If you enjoyed Reset by Sarina Dahlan, there is no doubt that you will find a lot to love in Preset as well. Yet while Reset wore its sci-fi ideas on its sleeve, Preset is sneakier about how it pulls you in. While I did struggle occasionally with bits of awkward prose, the overall story remains compelling and chilling for its timeliness, and has a shocker of an ending. Preset is a powerful addition to The Four Cities series.

Preset is available now from Blackstone Publishing, wherever books are sold.

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