My God! It's Full of Stars!

I finally finished Kim Stanley Robinson's 1985 novel, The Memory of Whiteness this morning. My conclusions? Well, like his Mars trilogy, I'd say it was OK, many great ideas but not really a classic. However to give him credit, it is one of those literary, tough ones, where the main protagonist is gifted with a blinding, new insight into the true nature of the universe. As an author is very unlikely to have discovered a radical revelation himself, then he must depend on an imagined abstraction to try and convey the enormity of the quantum leap in our perceptions of a universal reality.

It is a perennial problem in speculative fiction. Someone or something, somehow, has discovered the next step in human evolution/the key to the origins of the universe/the definitive equation for the universal theory of everything or whatever plot device the author has decide to use. This incomprehensible is going to revolutionize the lives of every being in that fictional universe forever. The reader is tantalised, rapt, expectant! But you know you're going to be disappointed when you turn those last few pages. The heroes of the novel may transcend to that higher plane, but you're going to be dropped back into your humdrum continuum, profoundly unenlightened!

You might consider one classic example, the extended light show at the end of Kubrick's 2001. The plucky astronaut is experiencing something enormously profound, the audience knows that "something wonderful" is happening, but when (in the original 2001 novel(-isation) and in the movie sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact) we get the line, "My God! It's full of Stars," you really would like AC Clarke to have been a little more elaborate about the nature of the profundity. Yes, it's all very trippy, but cue dubious HAL impersonation: "Sorry Dave, I don't really follow, could you try and be a little more specific."

The Memory of Whiteness depends on one of these speculative, paradigm shifting revelations. I don't want to risk a spoiler because I'd still recommend that you read this book, especially if you're a fan of the Mars trilogy. However, in the mid-eighties when KSR was writing this and quantum theories were gaining mainstream acceptance, the 10 dimensional geometry, the glints and the paradoxical determinism that the novel's main protagonist, Johannes Wright, the 9th master of Holywelkin's Orchestra, must struggle to comprehend, would have been so much more revelatory, magical, awe-inspiring and generally futuristic. A quarter of a century later in the post-post Penrose/Hawking indeterminate, infinitely parallelled reality that we perceive that we inhabit, these incomprehensibles seem a lot more mundanely credible.

It's a lot like E.E. "Doc" Smith's use of the, to him, then innovative "new magic" of atomic theory and Einsteinian relativism in the Lensman cycle. What was bleeding edge, "hard" science in the middle of the 20th century is anachronistic and to be honest, risible and annoying by the early 21st.

There's a lesson in here somewhere. Reading Scientific American and New Scientist and keeping abreast of the latest developments may help you add a patina of credibility to even the wildest fantasy, but as soon as that speculative research theory finds itself part of the accepted scientific canon, that ravishing, prophetic vision of the 3rd millennia can rapidly end up oh-so-very last century! Imagine how readers might look upon Asimov's Robots if ever true Artificial Intelligence becomes a reality. The positronic brain may end up as anachronistic as theories of the luminiferous aether or phlogistication!

Maybe that's why the "feudal" forgotten futures of series like Dune, the Books of the New Sun or even the Warhammer 40K universe are so attractive. They may ultimately be more enduring.

There's a fascinating wikipedia entry on scientific supersession here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theory

It's humbling to think how much of what we take as gospel today, may turn out to be total bunkum tomorrow!

Perhaps as Dave Bowman plunged into the depths of The Monolith his last transmission might more accurately have been:

"My God! It's full of Shit!"