Kaleidoscope Century

Rating:
Summary: More of the Meme Wars
Review: I just finished KALEIDOSCOPE CENTURY by John Barnes. I found this to be a fascinating tale of future and alternate history.

Josh is a longtimer. That means that every sixteen years he gets sick for six months and drops ten years of aging. He also drops most of his recent memories. Josh has just woken up on Mars and is trying to piece together his past involvement with the KGB and the Committee. Josh lived through and participated in some very violent and wildly changing times. Earth gets abandoned to AIs that make backup copies in humans, limited time travel has been discovered and man is exploring space. Through Josh's 140 years of life we see a fascinating history unfold beginning in the 1960's to the not very distant future.

This is a fun book if you like history. Bush gets a second term and dies of mutAIDS (an airborne variety), Yeltsin conducts a failed coup on international television and plenty of other historical quirks. The only problem is that there is not much in the way of plot. The title only becomes significant at the very end. So what you have is a forty or fifty page story interspersed among an interesting history.

This is one in a series of books dealing with the Memes (the Ais). Others include Candle, Orbital Resonance, and The Sky So Big and Black.

Rating:
Summary: More of the Meme Wars
Review: I just finished KALEIDOSCOPE CENTURY by John Barnes. I found this to be a fascinating tale of future and alternate history.

Josh is a longtimer. That means that every sixteen years he gets sick for six months and drops ten years of aging. He also drops most of his recent memories. Josh has just woken up on Mars and is trying to piece together his past involvement with the KGB and the Committee. Josh lived through and participated in some very violent and wildly changing times. Earth gets abandoned to AIs that make backup copies in humans, limited time travel has been discovered and man is exploring space. Through Josh's 140 years of life we see a fascinating history unfold beginning in the 1960's to the not very distant future.

This is a fun book if you like history. Bush gets a second term and dies of mutAIDS (an airborne variety), Yeltsin conducts a failed coup on international television and plenty of other historical quirks. The only problem is that there is not much in the way of plot. The title only becomes significant at the very end. So what you have is a forty or fifty page story interspersed among an interesting history.

This is one in a series of books dealing with the Memes (the Ais). Others include Candle, Orbital Resonance, and The Sky So Big and Black.

Rating:
Summary: A stunning and all-too-believable future
Review: I want to add my words of praise for this novel. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's depiction of a war-torn twenty-first century in an alternate timeline (that begins deviating from ours around 1990) is one of the most well thought through and believable near futures in all of SF. That alone makes the book well worth reading, but in addition it is told from the point of view of a sociopath whose life symbolizes the larger catastrophes the world suffers through; this bleakly reinforces the book's brutally clear depiction of the banality of evil. Read this book, and then go out into the world and work for the changes that we need to keep it from becoming reality.

Rating:
Summary: A stunning and all-too-believable future
Review: I want to add my words of praise for this novel. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's depiction of a war-torn twenty-first century in an alternate timeline (that begins deviating from ours around 1990) is one of the most well thought through and believable near futures in all of SF. That alone makes the book well worth reading, but in addition it is told from the point of view of a sociopath whose life symbolizes the larger catastrophes the world suffers through; this bleakly reinforces the book's brutally clear depiction of the banality of evil. Read this book, and then go out into the world and work for the changes that we need to keep it from becoming reality.

Rating:
Summary: Strains the imagination
Review: If I had to just write one word about this book it would be 'bizarre'. The future that Barnes dreams up is out there, way out there. Definately worth the read just to see what he'll come up with in the next chapter. Beware though, he definately highlights man's darker side. Reading it makes you feel ashamed of all the dark deeds that man has done and will do in the future. While reading this I would recommend really trying to visualize the world that Barnes describes, it is so strange that it's hard to believe that someone imagined it. In this case I hope fiction is stranger than truth.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent distillation of ideas
Review: Is Barnes a completely original author? No, of course not, none of his books contain concepts that will rock the SF world and create whole new subgenres, at best his books are a subtle updating of the themes and styles that Heinlein began, but that's part of the charm. So Barnes isn't a groundbreaking author, how many out there are? What he can do and what he does well is taking all the good ideas that are out there, putting his own spin on them and sometimes sticking together ideas that you wouldn't think to see together. In this book we've got basically his version of a Future History, the plot's a tad sketchy since ninety percent of the book takes place in flashback and the stuff that does happen toward the end borders on the confusing. But we have Josh, a soldier who's lived well over a hundred years and since the planet go from bad to really worse and been involved in his share of unpleasant activity. Barnes has caught some flak from reviewers about his anti-hero and his actions but keep in mind that nobody in the book is innocent and Josh is about the most decent person there, relatively speaking, he generally doesn't kill for pleasure unless he has to, even though he's not above cold blooded murder for a job. But it's his unique perspective and viewpoint that adds the flavor to the book, if the book had been told from the POV of a "good guy" then it wouldn't have been half as exciting. The structure Barnes uses adds to the fun as well, the flashback reel back and forth in time as Josh tries to sort out all the memories, sometimes stuff contradicts each other. Is it brutal and bloody? Sure, but so are the times Barnes is trying to detail and his depiction of our future is fairly fascinating, even if I wouldn't want to live there. He spends most of the book getting Josh up to speed and when the present day events kick in, it's not as great as you'd think it would be, it does explain a lot but still doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Still, the last page or so is classic and overall the book is a treat for the head, Barnes throws out a million concepts that all hang together well, and manages to make it all convincing at the same time. Those paying attention might make a case that this is the same universe and future that Orbital Resonance depicts and if so then it's a welcome alternate perpsective on stuff that was only touched on there. Still, for your money, gritty entertainment doesn't get any better than this and if you're not one of the faint of heart, you could do worse.

Rating:
Summary: People Just Don't Get John Barnes.
Review: It's gonna be tricky doing this one justice in just 1,000 words...

Barnes doesn't write "Nice" books where everybody lives happily ever after. And this is clearly his ugliest and most controversial book to date. Like all good science fiction, he takes some scientific principles, and imagines a world where they are in a different balance from the familiar. His genius lies in his ability to extrapolate a frighteningly accurate picture of the people who might inhabit such a place. When the place gets ugly, what do you think his characters are going to be like?

This is a DARK book. The main character is an American child of a militant communist mother and a wife-beating father. He's abused, disabused, and then recruited by the KGB as a spy. When a rapid-fire string of apocalytic diseases and wars fought by successively deadlier technology leave the world order upside down, what do you think the life of such a mercenary will be like? And I haven't even mentioned the Memes yet!

NOT for the squeamish. The violence is dirty and the sex is worse. You will want to take a bath when you're done. But if you can take the heat, prepare to have your socks blown off.

Rating:
Summary: Mind Viruses take over the Earth!
Review: It's the (not-so?) far future and Earth has been transformed into a battleground for viruses of the mind, commonly known as Memes with a capital M. Our hero and his fellow commandoes work as mercenaries in the employ of one Meme or another, surfing through life as they struggle to re-create memories periodically lost to them--the price they pay for a secret treatment that gives them eternal youth. Can an all-American boy find love and happiness in a universe where an innocent conversation may leave you infected by a mind virus such as One True, doomed to spend the rest of your existence in its service? Not the tightest or best SF ever written, but a graphic illustration of one possible outcome of meme evolution.

--Ricahrd Brodie, author, "Virus of the Mind"

Rating:
Summary: Meme Wars
Review: It's the (not-so?) far future and Earth has been transformed into a battleground for viruses of the mind, commonly known as Memes with a capital M. Our hero and his fellow commandos work as mercenaries in the employ of one Meme or another, surfing through life as they struggle to re-create memories periodically lost to them--the price they pay for a secret treatment that gives them eternal youth. Can an all-American boy find love and happiness in a universe where an innocent conversation may leave you infected by a mind virus such as One True, doomed to spend the rest of your existence in its service? Not the tightest or best SF ever written, but a graphic illustration of one possible outcome of meme evolution.

--Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant Post-Cyberpunk novel of the near future.
Review: John Barnes writes a brilliant near future history with one of the nastiest anti-heroes I've ever seen as the central character. No punches are pulled in this book as the main character eventually winds up doing just about every brazen criminal act possible, from rape, assassination, and casual murder to engaging in planetary ecological warfare (delivering the weapons, of course, not developing them).

The concept of computer program viruses so intelligent that they can study other computer systems unknown to them, figure out how they work, reformat their virus to work on the new system and copy the virus over for a takeover is made all the more chilling by the obvious corollary that the human mind is just another operating system to computer programs so awesomely sophisticated. I honestly found this refreshing in the extreme, quite the opposite pole from panty-waisted Star Trek episodes where computers 300+ years from now are frequently less sophisticated than the one I'm writing this review on.

In short, this book rocked! I've read it three times already, and while I've never grown to like the central character (he's psycho killer who would make Hannibal Lechter sit up and blink), the setting and technological extrapolation combined with a plot that just won't quit brings me back time and again.