History LaserGuidedAmnesia / Literature

* In AndyWeir's ''[[Literature/ProjectHailMary]]'', the narrator wakes up with classic TV amnesia: he can't remember his name or why he is in a spaceship, but he does remember all the science he's ever learned. [[TwoLinesNoWaiting Scenes of the past are interposed with scenes of the present]], framed as him slowly regaining his memories. [[spoiler:It turns out that he's been given laser-guided-amnesia-inducing drugs to cover up the fact that he did not in fact volunteer for the mission.]]

** In ''Literature/TheTruceAtBakura'', the ScaryDogmaticAliens known as the Ssi-ruuk would semi-regularly wipe the memories of their human slave Dev, much like one would with a droid, in order to make him forget about their abuse and keep his StockholmSyndrome intact. They called the process "renewal".

* Ken Follett's thriller ''Countdown to Zero'': An American rocket engineer involved in the [[UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace Vanguard project]] is subjected to this when [[spoiler: he discovers his wife & best friend are Russian double-agents attempting to sabotage the United States' space programme]].

* Rachel from ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' in ''The Andalite's Gift''.
** Averted with Tobias's mother, Loren, who [[DaddyHadAGoodReasonForAbandoningYou gave him up]] after a car accident left her both blind and amnesiac. He tracks her down years later, and she explains that she just didn't forget who she was or what she had done (including having a son), but things as basic as "how to brush your teeth" or "that those hard things in your mouth are called teeth."

** In the ''Literature/LastHeraldMageTrilogy'', Herald-Mage Vanyel works some kind of spell beyond the grave to make everyone believe that True Magic never existed in Valdemar except in ancient legends or stories. This stops an UnequalRites situation that was destroying confidence in the Heraldic Circle because the general public assumed that Herald-Mages must be better than "plain Heralds."

* Premise of the 1973 spy thriller ''The Tightrope Men''. The protagonist wakes up in a hotel room in Oslo, not only unable to remember who he is, but with an entirely different face and identity. It turns out that [[spoiler:he was kidnapped, brainwashed, and cosmetically altered to cover the abduction of the scientist he resembles. The only thing keeping him sane is that he still ''can'' remember some things, like his name, from his previous life -- the brainwashing was a hastily-done "butcher's job".]] The author Desmond Bagley said he thought up the most terrifying circumstance you could find yourself in and then wrote the novel around it.

* Subverted in ''The Wrong Reflection'' by Gillian Bradshaw. TheHero wakes up not knowing his own face or history and not fully able to operate in society. He needs help in figuring out that he has basic human rights and in one example, doesn't know what an 'oak tree' is. He knows science inside and out but the concept of 'muzzling' is a mystery.

In Creator/CordwainerSmith's Instrumentality series, a person who has committed an unspeakable crime can become a "forgetty", having all memories of the crime wiped out and screaming and collapsing unconscious if anyone tries to remind them about the incident.

* ''Landslide'' (1967): The protagonist has forgotten all personal information, ''including'' [[MistakenIdentity his own name]], in a car accident. That he hasn't forgotten the geology he studied before the accident becomes a minor plot point. He may or may not be a guy who was a fairly sociopathic criminal before the accident -- two people were in the car and he doesn't know which one he is. [[spoiler:He never does learn his previous identity, but he (and people who've come to like him) conclude that since he's a decent person now, it doesn't matter.]]
* In Creator/DanielKeysMoran's ''The Last Dancer'' an extremely long-lived (possibly effectively immortal) human from the distant past, future or a different time-stream (in-universe they are not substantially different concepts) arrives on earth several tens of thousands of years ago local time. Because of their long lifetimes, one of the abilities his society has developed is a method of "archiving" your own memories - like ZIP for the brain - so that your brain doesn't fill up over the eons, while still being able to retain older memories. Exceptionally long periods of meditation are required to organize and archive your memories in this way, which can result in a sort of self-imposed amnesia since you can decide what memories will get archived. He then suffers from head trauma that gives him LaserGuidedAmnesia and he mostly forgets his history, retaining the knowledge that yeah, he lives for a very very long time and a few scattered recent memories that he tries to piece back together over time. Averted in a sense because all his archived memories are still present, only it takes his brain a couple hundred years to heal over and recover the memories until he reaches a point where it all snaps back into place.

* In ''Confessions of a D-list Supervillain'' Mechani-Cal used a device to help the world forget their addiction to the Defeated mind-control bugs. Later it is used on his new girlfriend and Superhero Aphrodite by her EX to forget her feelings for Mechani-Cal.

* In Creator/UmbertoEco's ''The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana'', the protagonist suffers from amnesia that leaves him with only his semantic memory, erasing whatever he had made a personal connection with. He's left with memories of the books he's read and of various subconscious procedures (e.g., writing his name on a check), but not of his wife or his childhood.

* In ''Lyra and Bon Bon and the Mares from S.M.I.L.E.'', the use of a mirror and a spell called Reflection Deflection induces this.

* In Donald E. Westlake's final novel, ''Memory'', the protagonist, Paul Cole, suffers brain damage after sleeping with another man's wife. At first, he's fine, but as the story goes on, he loses most of his memory function. He can remember things, but they leak out of his head. [[spoiler:[[DownerEnding It does not end well.]]]]

* ''LightNovel/ACertainMagicalIndex'':