THE READING RHEUM: THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS (1985)

Knowledge by acquaintance is the direct apprehension of something through the senses-- the primary way of knowing. But discursive knowledge includes all that language does... discourse is as importance as acquaintance, even if it isn't primary-- the character "Dent Ios" in THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS.

I read Kim Stanley Robinson's MEMORY OF WHITENESS-- his second novel, I believe-- after forcing myself to plow through the first, ICEHENGE. While ICEHENGE was a tedious exercise in anthropological SF, MEMORY seems to be chock full of philosophical SF-elements that seem just like my cup of tea: concepts of language and music (as seen in the above quote), Romantic poetry (Shelley in particular), archaic myth, particularly that of Persian Mithraism, and even Epicurean ideas a la Lucretius. In terms of all of these elements, MEMORY is as rich as Herbert's DUNE.

However, Robinson doesn't manage to make any of the elements live, because the characters of MEMORY, like those of ICEHENGE, never grabbed me and made me feel like they were anything more than spokespersons for Robinson's thoughts. It's not entirely a matter of the skill of drawing characters. Robert Heinlein generally uses only a small handful of character-types, and no one would call him to be the equal of Dickens in terms of making fictional figures seem intensely real. Yet even in Heinlein's worst works, I've always felt that his characters are intensely involved in their own lives, whether in terms of preserving themselves from danger or just expatiating on their own philosophies. Thus, as rich as Robinson's concepts are, the characters are unable to make them "live." This may be, in part, because one of Robinson's themes is that time may be an illusion and that there is no "Becoming," only "Being." It may be that it's awfully hard for an author to make himself care about his own characters if he considers their arcs predestined.