Paperjam

The Memory of Whiteness by Kim Stanley Robinson

Literature // Nick // 6th May 2006

This is an old book, first published in 1985, and I’ve only come to it from reading other novels by the author. KSR is probably best known for writing a trilogy about the colonisation of Mars, namely Red, Green and Blue Mars. What distinguishes him from the crowd of Sci-Fi writers is that his writing, certainly for these books, can be more viewed as future history, extrapolation of current science forward. He is a modern-day polymath with regards to the knowledge displayed in physics, political science, biology and social and political sciences, with a strong ecological bent that makes for fascinating reading. What makes these books so compelling is that this learning does not get in the way of incredibly strong characters that drive the story forward. At the end of the trilogy I was genuinely sad I was saying goodbye to the population of this fictional world. Suffice to say I am a fan – and can fully understand both that these three books took around 15 years research to write; they also all won awards within the Sci-Fi world on publication. I only wish that they were not pigeon-holed in the Sci-Fi camp.

This book was written prior to the Mars trilogy, but is based in a society over a thousand years in the future rather than at most a few hundred; however for those who have read the trilogy the history involved this knits into the world view it espoused. You do not have to know this though. The book is self-contained, and the plot is based around music.

In this far distant future, as one of those strange anachronisms that history shows so often, there is a musical institute in the outer reaches of the Solar System based upon a single instrument – the Orchestra. The Orchestra was devised by a single person, Holywelkin, nine generations previously, and is a complex device that consists of a collection of instruments equivalent to a current day orchestra that can be played by a single person, via multiple keyboards, pre-defined loops, breath controllers – actually like a modern day PC based music workstation, but playing real instruments with mechanical arms rather than samples. The story follows the latest incumbernt ‘master’ of the Orchestra through a grand tour, starting at the outer planets and ending on a station extracting power from the Sun inside the orbit of Mercury.
What drives this story is a philosophical quest. The inventor of the Orchestra, Holywelkin, was a mathematician, who pulled together the quantum indeterminate elements of physics with the determinate macro-level models, and delved below the current String theory to what appears at the time to be ultimate model of the universe. After achieving this, which has allowed the diaspora of the human race due to practical effects that can be achieved using this theory, he exiled himself to the outer reaches of the Solar system and concentrated on music as the best and only hope of communicating the understanding that had come from this theory.

The new Master of the Orchestra is obsessed with this view, and composes by using the equations to generate music, whilst trying to understand their meaning. At the same time he is being manipulated by a group of ‘meta-dramatists’, who treat real-world interactions as something to be manipulated for the purpose of creating a play of aesthetic beauty. It is questioned as to whether they have real control – are they being manipulated at a higher level, as the ultimate consequence of Holywelkin’s model that the universe is deterministic and those who know this are in ‘control’, so all causes and effects are tied and can be viewed as a single unchanging extant entity, time merely being an illusion. However those in ‘control’ are not, as it is deterministic.

The novel is not as dense as it sounds to read, and you could happily rip through it without worrying about these things. The denouement can be viewed in two ways, either as a confirmation of determinism or a confirmation of how we can be manipulated. Models of the universe are like a Russian doll – there is the original theory of Fate, deterministic; then the ideas of Hericlitus and other Greeks; that of free will; Newtonian physics, again deterministic; Quantum physics again allowing a random factor and therefore a chink in which to slot free will; Holywelkin physics again deterministic. The latest model may be one or the other – it is only the latest model, but ultimately when is the model correct?

In many ways this book is not as sophisticated as others by the author, as it does not deal so much with science and sociology or politics; but it asks some fundamental questions regarding the nature of reality and consciousness that are not often asked in books; future, history or otherwise. Definitely worth a punt.

I would thoroughly recommend reading the Mars trilogy too. There is also a little book stories by the author called ‘Escape from Kathmandu’ that is an utter gem, a complete flight of fancy based in the present day, but difficult to get hold of.