The Memory of Whiteness - Softcover

ROBINSON, KIM STANLEY

3.56

681 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812552350 ISBN 13: 9780812552355

Publisher: Tom Doherty Assoc Llc, 1986

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An early novel from Science Fiction legend Kim Stanley Robinson, The Memory of Whiteness is now available for the first time in decades.

In 3229 AD, human civilization is scattered among the planets, moons, and asteroids of the solar system. Billions of lives depend on the technology derived from the breakthroughs of the greatest physicist of the age, Arthur Holywelkin. But in the last years of his life, Holywelkin devoted himself to building a strange, beautiful, and complex musical instrument that he called The Orchestra.

Johannes Wright has earned the honor of becoming the Ninth Master of Holywelkin's Orchestra. Follow him on his Grand Tour of the Solar System, as he journeys down the gravity well toward the sun, impelled by a destiny he can scarcely understand, and pursued by mysterious foes who will tell him anything except the reason for their enmity.

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Review:

Though now best known for his massive 1990s Mars trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson has been publishing fine, intelligent SF novels since 1984. The Memory of Whiteness (1985) describes a grand musical tour of the 33rd-century solar system, beginning on Pluto at the bleak outer edge, visiting various moons, asteroids and planets, and climaxing in the blinding light and heat of a futuristic power station orbiting close to the Sun's solar-flare zone. All these places are habitable thanks to technologies spawned by the Unified Field Theory of physicist Holywelkin, whose other gift to posterity was his mysterious Orchestra--a fantastic amalgam of over 150 instruments controllable by a single player. Past Orchestra Masters simply played classical music, but the new master is a visionary who thinks he sees Holywelkin's original purpose: to explore his revolutionary Ten Forms of Change equations through music, and reach a devastating insight about the universe. The interplay of music and mathematics (as in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach) is persuasive and resonant. Meanwhile, plots, deceptions, conspirators, cultists, and sabotage attempts dog the Grand Tour as it spirals inward through the system.... Gripping thriller elements alternate with elegant philosophical speculation and slightly cutesy asides to the "dear Reader". Strange and fascinating. --David Langford

Review:

‘An elegance that manages to contain a what-happens-next vigour... It makes astonishing connections’
THE TIMES

‘A masterpiece’
ANALOGUE

‘A symphony of ideas’
GREG BEAR

‘Rich and compelling’
INTERZONE

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