Midaregami

I have finished Green Mars, but its sequel hasn’t turned up in the local used bookstore yet, so I have moved on. In lieu of it, I picked up another Kim Stanley Robinson book, “Icehenge.”

The premise: the discovery of an array of huge frozen megaliths on the north pole of Pluto, with the central pillar bearing an inscription in Sanskrit. This sounds suspiciously Clarkian¹, but it is not.

This story is not about the origin of humanity, or some ancient alien race passing through with a message or a plan. The structure was built by humans, during the course of the novel—and then forgotten. You see, by this time the science of gerontology has advance to the point where a human can reasonably expect to live a millennium, but their memory—ah, that is a problem. It’s hard enough to remember one century of experience, let alone ten. The elderly of this society (which is to say, most of it) pass through the centuries in a kind of aimless blue haze, ineffably depressed and unable to remember when things were vibrant and meaningful, in the earlier centuries of their life.

So when the megaliths are discovered, some five centuries after their construction, some of the original planners may be still alive—but through a combination of political motivation, amnesia, and pure bad luck, nobody can remember who or why. And so history is interpreted and reinterpreted.

It is a supremely melancholy novel, suggesting how even the most magnificent and lucid of human endeavors will eventually be rendered meaningless or inscrutable by the passage of time, even if their architects live on.

Now, while it may be that I can expect to live longer than any of my ancestors, I do not expect to confront memory capacity issues due to extreme old age. I do expect to confront—indeed, am already confronting—memory integrity problems.

Sometimes, I cannot believe that I ever went to Japan, let alone lived there for two years. Hell, I can’t even believe I’ve lived in Montana for the better part of a year. I look back on my postadolescent years with a kind of head-scratching, befuddled wonder. Did I actually do all that stuff? Did I do any of that stuff? It would be hard to say—except that for some of it, there is a record.

So you see, this business of “oh, I’m tired and boring, waaaah” is not only tiresome and lame, it makes for bad personal historiography.

¹Admittedly, I thrive on Great Cosmic Mysteries like this. Anybody remember how “Ghost from the Grand Banks” ended? Where the hyper-advanced space probe built by staggeringly distant descendants of the human race happens upon Earth and re-excavates the Titanic? Oh baby.

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