Rating: 
Summary: appallingly, pointlessly unpleasant
Review: Ok, technically there is a point, but it's really, really not worth it. Led on by my great enjoyment of the complex and imaginative milieux in _A Million Open Doors_ and _Earth Made of Glass_, I plowed all the way through this repetitively violent book, hoping that the main character would turn sympathetic at some point. No dice. The ending shows some intellectual ingenuity, but nowhere near that of _Doors_ or _Glass_, or even _Orbital Resonance_. A must-miss.
Rating:
Summary: I didn't get it
Review: Short version:Don't buy the book, it's a waste of money. Slightly longer version: What I got was an ok story about some old guy on Mars reminiscing about his life in the 21st century, with some incomprehensible gibberish about time travel at the end. The technology was fairly interesting; nothing earth shattering, like the stuff Greg Egan can turn out -- buy his 'Distress', its awesome! -- but not too bad. The one good idea was the 'war of the memes' -- basically computer viruses versatile enough to cross operating systems, including those of the human brain. So: its inferior to others, but it's got some good ideas. Buy at your own risk. Long version: (Be warned, spoilers ahead!) When Vernor Vinge writes puzzles, he explains them. 'A Deepness in the Sky' has got to be one of the all time best books ever written. There's a scene, when the Onoff star's off, when Ezr Vinh wanders near a statue; that's the statue in Lands Command, when the star's on. Deepness is an incredibly good book even on a fast read, missing all the clues; the second, slower reread, where you spot the clues, and the puzzles being explained, just makes it better. Larry Niven's recent books: 'The Ringworld Throne', 'Destiny's Road', 'The Burning City', are very very good, filled with little puzzles and clues which are explained later. The trouble with Kaliedoscope Century is that the clues are (from my pov) really deeply buried; and even after the puzzle's explained (the time travel gibberish at the end) I still didn't get it! Here's a puzzle that wasn't explained: (Niven would never have done this) the joke in the name Reagan Foster Hinkley is: Reagan: President of the USA, 1981 - 89, disliked communists. Foster: Communist party leader in America, ran for the presidency in the 1920's and 30's. Hinkley: sadly, britannica.com has no entry on this. Anyone? Ulysses S. Grant was President of the USA in 1868 and 1872. The main character's supposed to be looping through time, changing it as he goes. The only repetition I can see is on p69 and p71 & 72; on p69 we have "the First Oil War" in 1991, and "the USSR was just another nation, more like a big run-down Sweden than anything else"; on p71 & 72 the main char gets back in "December 1991" just afer defending Tehran in "Oil War Two" and then he's off to Russia for a war expected in April next year. As for the rest, the story seems to be a chronological whole, albeit interspersed with complaints by the main char that he can remember different versions; unfortunately his explanation of a faulty memory is completely plausible. To top it all, one date is a misprint: on p66 the main char calls the 1940's the "Grey Decade"; he actually means the 2040's. The bit about time loops is central to getting the plot, so here is how I understand it. We picture time as a single stream, carrying everybody along. Then someone creates a singularity, which generates a loop in time, off the main stream. I picture the loop as a rectangule. One straight side matches up with the main time stream, representing the creation of the singularity until the time it disappears. You enter the singularity at any point on this edge, go round the loop and emerge at the instant the singularity's created, merging with the main stream of time. At this instant the time stream splits; one line where you entered the singularity and disappeared, and the other where you emerge from the singularity at the instant of its creation. This stream now contains two of you. If one of you enters the singularity again, you go round, and now _two_ of y'all emerge from the singularity: the guy who first entered, and the second guy. Each time you go around, all of y'all emerge from the singularity simultaneously at the instant of its creation and go down a brand new time stream. Nobody goes down the same stream twice; this is to preserve causality. To go back in time you go to the singularity, dive in, and immediately you're carried to the singularity's beginning. From details at the end the Soviets created a singularity on the far side of the Sun, in Earth's orbit, in 1987; our hero wants to get to 1987; therefore he should head for that singularity. What he actually does (p242) is, he travels through *two* singularities: there's a thousand-year long one at the edge of the solar system, that he goes through first. I haven't the faintest idea why he wants to go through this singularity, when the one in Earth's orbit is the one he wants. That singularity's still open; it lasts for 144 years, it was created in 1987 and the year is now 2109. It also says on p224 that you can emerge at any time from the singularity, not just at the instant its created. This doen't quite fit with statements made on p64 and p227. I don't get it. Also: he's living through his past. He's doing roughly the same things for/to the same people in the same places. He's joined the army at least twice on p69 and p72. And he does this by making himself young and travelling through time. So what happens to the original him? And what happens to all the other versions who come through the singularity with him? On p142 he meets (and badly beats up) an old guy who just maybe could be one of his other versions; but I'm grasping at straws. John Barnes is a bright guy; 'Mother of Storms' was a good book. So doubtless there's some logic behind this story. But it's so badly written, IMO, that you're better off reading Niven or Vinge.
Rating: 
Summary: Buy it, but buy it on sale.
Review: Sometimes you run across a story so disjointed that only once you've finished it have you really begun it. This is one of those stories. At times intruiging, at times confusing, but overall a fascinating view of a future that we all hope could never be.
Rating:
Summary: An Amoral Classic-could-have-been
Review: The premise of this book was so original and daring that it took about two seconds for me to decide to purchase it. When I finished I thought the treatment of the premise was better that I'd ever imagined. But what garbage one has to go through to reach the end! I can take books about bad guys - even those that praise the creeps as somehow worth redemption. What I cannot take are the amoral "heroes"- those people who do evil things without considering them evil. The so-called hero in this book started out as a young Red in the 80's in America (unlikely), worked for the KGB and its successor, the Organization. In the course of his many manifestations (every ten years he became younger but lost his memories) he killed innocent people to "make it look good", shot a housewife in the mouth, tortured, murdered kids, and engaged in the worst terrorism possible. All these cute activies were were presented in a slightly giggly tone of "well, so what?" Most evil people acknowledge their evil. Stalin never tried to pass for a social worker. Castro never pretended to belive in freedom. Al Capone knew he was a bad guy and acted accordingly. But the idea of presenting them as moral equivalents - well, maybe I don't have the literary "taste" to appreciate such a concept. God, how I wish the hero could have been a hero. Tragic end to a fine tale.
Rating: 
Summary: One Hell of a book!
Review: This book is, simply put, amazing. Barnes' vision of the future is dark and twisted, with a good bit of humor thrown in for good measure. Barnes also manages to take very technical theoritcal science ideas and put them into laymans terms and make the whole idea believable. As I said before, Amazing. Five Stars. Buy it. Today if you can. As for the Reagan Foster Hinckley joke that one of the other reviewers didn't get, it goes like this: Ronald Reagan, former president of the United States from 1981 until 1989 was shot by John Hinckley, a madman who was in love with Jodie Foster, and was trying to prove it by killing the president. Hence Reagan Foster Hinckley.
Rating: 
Summary: Ouch. Great Book.
Review: This is a clever, modern piece with shades of Simak and Dick (in 'time-travel' and 'what is truth?' modes), which should probably not be read by those of a nervous disposition, nor by those who care not to get to know characters saddled with intermittent pretty unpleasant character defects.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece -- but a bummer
Review: This is a tour de force in every way; a consistent and sensible future-world, interesting action, and characters who hold your interest. But there's the problem (it's not a flaw, because Barnes did it on purpose). The characters are so damned repulsive that by the end of the book you feel unclean. Ugh. And it doesn't help that, in a wholly unadmirable way, it's at core a love story. It's truly a masterpiece in terms of craft, but it's not beach reading. At least, not if you want to enjoy the beach.
Rating:
Summary: Josh, the quintessential evil anti-hero
Review: This is a VERY good story about a VERY evil man. How do you become emotionally invested in a main character who is a rapist, murderer, KGB spy, and all around selfish bastard? The answer is here. I have no idea how an American KGB spy is made but chances are the answer is in this book. It is the story about how Josh became a spy for the wrong side and did their dirty work--and let me assure you, the work is about as dirty as you will ever read. You become emotionally invested when you find out his father was an abusive drunk and his mother was a commie activist nut. No wonder he is such a basket case! In fact, this story would be a good text book in a "How to make an anti-hero" writing class. The main story details his search for security (since he had none growing up). He never looks beyond himself. He has no love of communism, certainly no love of capitalism and not much love period. He is out for himself and the rest of the world can go to hell. If the story interests you so far then read the book. It's a dark, fascinating, downward spiral into depravity. Quite frankly, you hate the main character but you keep reading to find out what happens to him at the end of the story. If, so far, this is not your kind of story, then don't read it. It's doubtful you will like it. Not knowing much about John Barnes, I find it interesting that later on he worked with all-American Buzz Aldrin on some other projects making him a truly complex writer. Five stars for showing me something I've never seen before.
Rating:
Summary: Dark but brilliant
Review: This is the book that introduced me to John Barnes. Alot of negativity about this book, and I imagine much of it is well deserved. "Kaleidoscope Century" lacks a solid protagonist. The only character we have to latch onto is a complete sadist whose entire life is filled with committing acts of rape, murder in the name of....who knows what. Joshua Al Quarre is in it for no one but himself. Lets face it. Barnes was having a bad couple of months while writing this book, but his genius shines through. Despite lacking in sympathetic major characters, Barnes blows through...well...a century of a very grim and plausible alternate future. Once the Memes show up (programs that are capable of re-writing the human mind), you are already blown away by this stunning and wildly inventive book. "Kaleidoscope Century" is very short. I finished it in about four hours. But its a ride I tell you. If you can forgive heavily misanthropic themes and just enjoy the story, I guarantee you'll have a good time.
Rating:
Summary: Derivative, nasty and dull
Review: This is the only book of Barnes I have read so far, so I am not going to make any wholesale judgements about him yet. However this book is derivative, nasty and, contrary to the praise heaped on his style, stylistically limited and at times dull. It seems overly influenced (and that's being kind) by Heinlein's Time Enough for Love. I know it is meant to be violent and immoral, because that is the world Barnes has created, but there seems too much sympathy with the violence, and not enough style and panache in the writing to compensate; in fact it is just tedious at times.
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