Description:
John Barnes writes hard SF with a heart; his speculations are always grounded in working things out from first principles, but he remembers to think also about how his imaginary situations might feel. "Gentleman Pervert, Out on a Spree," for example, starts with some speculation about tagging, and the speed with which an information age can make a marginal life worse--Ken is photographed curb-crawling and is then divorced and fired before he even gets home. It moves, though, in unexpected directions--no excuses are made for Ken and his compulsions, yet we get to know and even love him like a deeply flawed younger brother. When Barnes writes of the fall of civilization to Christianity and/or barbarism, his rationalism does not rule out empathy for other ways of seeing--and there is a sense that armed conflict always involves collateral losses of more than just lives. The doomed soldier of "Advice to the Civilized" knows that in that regret lies the whole difference between civilization and barbarism. The stories come packaged with some nonfiction--Barnes writes well about building a world and his views on style and criticism; he writes inspirationally about education and his hopes for the future. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk
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