Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 221

to the distant future, crisscrossing the world, but ending where they
began, in the islands of the South Paciic. The characters are contained
in discrete stories that proceed chronologically, the irst ive of which are
broken off before ending. Each story references the previous one by hav-
ing a character read about it as, for example, one person happens on the
journal produced by the main character in an earlier story. The sixth story
is the pivot point, and from that one, each story is completed in reverse
chronological order, each tale nested within the others like a set of Russian
dolls. Recalling Shelley's classic poem, Mitchell's history is cyclical. The
linearity we appear to experience is little more than a comforting mirage.
The cloud and its atlas take three forms in the novel. The irst is
music, which, alongside poetry, is a familiar type of discourse for present-
ing clouds. One of the six characters, a young musician named Robert
Frobisher, works on “The Cloud Atlas Sextet,” which he completes just
before committing suicide. The next main character to appear locates a
rare recording of the piece in an old music shop. The sextet embodies the
unity in difference that the six main characters represent and was produced
while the young Frobisher was helping a well-known composer complete
the major symphony, appropriately called Eternal Recurrence . Contem-
plating his plan to end his young life, Frobisher is resolute: “My head is a
roman candle of invention. Lifetime's music arriving all at once. Boundar-
ies between noise and sound are conventions, I see now. All boundaries
are conventions, I see now, national ones too. One may transcend any
convention, if only one can irst conceive of doing so” (Mitchell 2004,
460). And so Frobisher transcends convention by conceiving an atlas of
clouds, in musical form.
Frobisher's sextet is the cloud's way of speaking about the novel's pro-
tagonists, but each character is also connected to another, and thereby
lives on in the low of history, through a distinct form of communication,
a second manifestation of the cloud. Adam Ewing leaves a personal diary,
Luisa Rey is the character in a mystery potboiler, Timothy Cavendish lives
on in a ilm made about his sad life, and Sonmi, a heroic cyborg, emerges
in the future as a goddess whose totems are worshipped. The simple
Zachry survives through the stories, some true, some not, that his children
recall. Finally, as the world stands on the brink of self-inlicted destruction
we encounter the orison, a small egg-shaped, holographic communica-
tion device that is several generations ahead of today's best-equipped