blincoln's Journal: Required Reading 2

This is another excerpt from an Alastair Reynolds novel. He's really quite good, but almost unheard of here in North America. I had to import his latest (Absolution Gap) from England because it won't be out here for another four months. This quote and the last one are funny, but the stories as a whole are very serious and interesting. Any sci-fi fan owes it to themselves to pick up Revelation Space, and go from there.

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"I'm an artist," Quirrenbach said. "Actually, a composer. I'm working on a symphony cycle; my life's work. That's what brings me here."

"Music?"

"Yes, Music - though that contemptible little word barely encapsulates what I have in mind. My next symphony will be a work inspired by nothing less than Chasm City." He smiled. "It was going to be a glorious, uplifting piece, celebrating the city in all its Belle Epoque splendour; a composition teeming with vitality and energy. Now, I think, it will have to be a darker piece entirely; Shostakovichian in its solemnity; a work weighed down by the crushing realisation that history's wheel has finally turned and crushed our mortal dreams to dust. A plague symphony."

"And that's what you've come all this way for? To scribble down a few notes?"

"To scribble down a few notes, yes. And why not? Someone, after all, has to do it."

"But it'll take you decades to get back home."

"A fact that has, surprisingly, impinged on my consciousness before you so kindly pointed it out. But my journey here is a mere prelude, occupying a span of time that will become inconsequential when set against the several centuries that I confidently expect to elapse before the work nears completion. I myself will probably age the better part of a century in that time - the equivalent of two or three whole working lives of any of the great composers. I shall be visiting dozens of systems, of course - and adding others to my itinerary as they become significant. There will almost certainly be more wars, more plagues, more dark ages. And times of miracle and wonder, of course. All of which will be grist to the mill of my great work. And when it is polished, and when I am not utterly disgusted and disillusioned with it, I will very probably find myself in my twilight years. I simply won't have time to keep abreast of the latest longevity techniques, you see; not while I'm pouring my energies into my work. I'll just have to take whatever's easily available and hope I live to finish my magnum opus. Then, when I have tidied up the work, and achieved some form of reconciliation between the crude scribblings I have set down now and the undoubtedly masterful and fluid work I will be producing at the end of my life, I will take a ship back to Grand Teton - assuming it still exists - where I will announce the great work's premier. The premier itself won't be for another fifty or so years afterwards, depending on the extent of human space at that time. That will give time for word to reach even the most distant colonies, and for people to begin converging on Grand Teton for the performance. I will sleep while the venue is constructed - I already have something suitably lavish in mind - and an orchestra worthy of the event is assembled, or bred, or cloned - whichever the case may be. And when that fifty years is done, I will rise from slumber, step into the limelight, conduct my work and, in what little time remains to me, bask in a fame the like of which no living composer has ever or will ever know. The names of the great composers will be reduced to mere footnote entries; barely flickering embryo stars set against the gemlike brilliance of my own stellar conflagration. My name will ring down the centuries like a single undying chord."

There was a long silence before I responded.

"Well, you've got to have something to aim for, I suppose."

--- Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City