In the far future, a conductor is chosen as the next master to inherit stewardship of the Holywelkin Orchestra--basically the ultimate one-man band, the musical instrument of the era. But he gets hooked on drugs, throwing his future into question, only to have an epiphany, go blind, and get his mojo back, kicking the habit just a couple of pages after he picks it up. Time passes, and the blind master plays concerts to the many human colonies from Pluto to Mercury while a mysterious cabal of people try to kill him. A human sect has mathematically proven that free will doesn't exist, that determinism is the truth of our existence, but the novel ends with a kind of refutation of that premise thanks, I think, to music? Heck if I know. My interest faded about halfway through the novel, mainly because, as usual, Robinson is great at developing big concepts, but his characters are so robotic it's really hard to care what happens to them.
Would I have enjoyed this novel more if I understood the first thing about music? Maybe.
1 comment:
It's hard to refute determinism in art, though. Sisko always find the tribble with the bomb. He never fails no matter how many times we watch that episode.
I suppose there will come an AI where we can remake that episode so that Sisko misses the bomb. At that point, truth will no longer have meaning. Or will it be the other way around, since replaying Sisko's time-travel adventures is also a lie?
Put another way, sometimes authors go way past what readers expect. Douglas Adams had no ending in mind for The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, but he did take the money to write one. Two weeks before the final deadline, his editor forcibly locked him in a hotel room with a typewriter, and he wrote the final three-fourths of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish there.
Could you tell?
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