With the entire solar system as a stage, Robinson's grand Space Opera is a heady mix of technological wonders (harnessed singularities turn asteroids into lush oases) and philosophical musings which attempt to draw links between music, quantum arcana, and human consciousness (sometimes a melody is not just a melody!) But it all gets muddled down by conspiracy paranoia and pseudo-religious tangents involving robed cultists and a mad playwright while the novel's central gimmick, a towering structure of musical instruments controlled by a single player, had me picturing something straight out of Dr. Seuss' Whoville. Robinson has a beautiful way with words however, if only he hadn't used so many. ( )

The grand theme of this book is music. I cannot think of much SF I've read where this was the case, or even a big factor: The three Crystal Singer books by Anne McCaffrey and a short story by James Blish, the latter being good and the former being OK.

Robinson, on typically ambitious form, takes us on a tour of the solar system alongside the protagonist, a composer who develops a grand vision of how music and physics relate to each other at a fundamental level and creates music that gives people transcendant visions in response to hearing it. Now, music is sound and sound is a wave and waves have been studied by physicists for centuries and, of course, music can have a powerful and pretty direct effect on our emotional state, so there is some reality behind the ideas presented. I think that's all Robinson really wants to say; music is powerful and that power is mysterious in that, fundamentally, it's just a superposition of waves. He drops some hints that the Baroque composers are his personal inspiration. This is no surprise as there is supposed to be a correlation between high mathematical talent and liking the Baroque period in general and J.S. Bach particularly.

It's an interesting book, with a thriller plot-thread running through it to drive the narrative along but, surprisingly, the characters seem quite thin. This is odd because usually Robinson's great strength is characterisation, so much so that he can make it a fault by spending too much effort on it at the expense of slow pacing. No slow pace here. There is also very little in the way of ecological protection as a theme, which is again unusual for Robinson. His obsessions with Mars in general and Olympus Mons (the solar-system's biggest volcano) specifically are all present and correct, however.

The protagonist's visions of the nature of reality reminded me of a similar thing in [b:Galileo's Dream|6391377|Galileo's Dream|Kim Stanley Robinson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1303142224s/6391377.jpg|6579805], where it is done better. It would be tempting to say Robinson has improved as a writer in the intervening time but my experience is that his books have been a pretty random hit-or-miss collection with no obvious trend. This one sits firmly in the middle, neither the most perfect nor the most ambitious and not the weakest by some distance, either.

If you are a Robinson fan already, I can recommend this one; if you have never read any, I would recommend starting elsewhere, e.g. [b:Antarctica|41126|Antarctica|Kim Stanley Robinson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320509406s/41126.jpg|3011567]. ( )

The Memory Of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance, is Kim Stanley Robinson’s third book, and from what I can gather his most philosophical. In it, he tries to tie a few threads of thought together: how determinism ties in with quantum physics and free will; art as representation of reality; how human thinking corresponds with reality & direct and indirect kinds of knowledge. The device KSR uses to connect all this is music.

The Memory Of Whiteness is philosophical musings first, and story second. I don’t think it has aged particularly well, and I don’t think it has a lot to offer to people that are already familiar with the topics I listed above – and I don’t mean as familiar like a CERN scientist, but familiar in a Quantum Physics For Dummies kinda way. I’m not sure how well known the general outlines of quantum physics were back in the 1980ies, but today those outlines are pretty much common knowledge to people with a healthy interest in their reality and a library card.

The notion of indeterminacy on a subatomic level has been a veritable feast for some philosophers of the postmodern ilk: an electron’s speed can’t be measured at the same time as its spin! Nothing is certain!! What we feel has been proven by hard science!!! Praise Heisenberg!!!! It went so far that people thinking philosophically about truth and representation – and that means nearly everybody writing theory about the arts, as most (if of not all) art is grounded in representation, as also non-representative art stems from representative predecessors – needed to become familiar with the Quantum. Of course, all this was quite overblown. It’s not because some subatomic processes are strange and weird that our Newtonian world – still the only world we live in – all of a sudden becomes unknowable and undetermined. Still, serious writers and serious philosophers needed to opine about Schrödinger’s cat and the possible existence of the Higgs boson, and Einstein’s dictum that ‘God doesn’t play dice’ was made fun of, even in works of popular culture that needed to a claim on depth.

Kim Stanley Robinson clearly wasn’t a fool, not even back in those days. He saw through this mirage of uncertainty, and envisioned a world that was beyond these debates.

Newtonian physics is deterministic. It is true that it fits into the larger framework of the probabilistic system of quantum mechanics. But quantum mechanics fits into the larger framework of Holywelkin physics; and Holywelkin physics is again deterministic.

Holywelkin is a fictional scientist, and The Memory Of Whiteness is set in 3229 AD – it chronicles a tour of humanity’s most important musician/composer throughout the solar system.

(...)

Please read the rest of the analysis on Weighing A Pig ( )

I don't really get Kim Stanley Robinson I guess, of the two books of his I've read this was the better one, but it was still pretty dull stuff. ( )

It was ok but very hard to follow maybe ok for philosophical purposes but I did not get that too much.

Started out ok however ended up being too vague a story line to follow for me. ( )