John Barnes: Finity (1999)

Edition: Gollancz, 2001
Review number: 821

John Barnes has written several novels about culture clashes (most recently A Million Open Doors); this paranoid alternative universe novel is almost more of the same. Finity is a science fiction thriller; investigation of sabotage at a huge company turns up evidence that a large number of alternate versions of reality are beginning to collide Colleagues no longer share the same idea of history, or even of recent events. In addition, something has happened to the USA, or its equivalent in every alternative reality; the rest of the world has lost contact with it, without realising.

There seem to me to be several holes in the explanations of what's going on in Finity (there is also more exposition than in most of Barnes' novels). Some things are just sloppy - Barnes surely cannot mean that there can only be a finite number of combinations of a finite number of symbols as he seems to say; an infinite collection of numbers can be built from the symbols 0-9. It is also not the case that a point has infinitely many neighbours; neighbour is not a valid concept in Euclidean space - within a particular distance of any point there are infinitely many points, but there are always ones closer than any given one). Some of his explanations of quantum physics also contain suspect statements, and the idea that use of quantum computer powered devices will swap an individual into an alternate universe seems pretty ludicrous.

Although alternative realities are interesting, it is difficult to see any way to travel from one to another, and this is something which an author needs to face once multiple alternates are introduced. This has been done in several ways. In The Man in the High Castle, they are fictions in each other (linked by the I Ching), and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius series makes them fantasies. In other Moorcock novels, alternate realities are a by-product of time travel, which is left with an unexplained mechanism, and Robert Heinlein mixes this idea with that of fiction in The Number of the Beast and the novels that followed it. Other ideas used by writers include traumatic events such as near death experiences or experiencing other universes by drug taking. In almost every case, though, these are more causes of travel between alternates than explanations of how it might be possible.

To have no real explanation, particularly when dealing with one of the well established components of the genre, is not really a problem. (The reader tends to think, "Oh yes, alternate realities" or "time machines", or whatever, and it's a concept already familiar and acceptable to them.) However, Barnes does attempt an explanation, and this is not very convincing. As a result, the novel as a whole is diminished. In general, Barnes is a writer I admire a great deal; but Finity is his most disappointing novel to date.

John Barnes: Earth Made of Glass (1998)

Edition: Gollancz, 1998
Review number: 711

The sequel to A Million Open Doors is set over a decade later. The central characters, Giraut de Leones and his wife Margaret (who met in the course of the first novel) are in something of a rut in their relationship, despite the interest of their job as ambassadors seeking to help bring back together the splintered Thousand Cultures of humanity as instantaneous travel between the human colonised planets of the galaxy has become possible. They are given a new assignment, to travel to Briana, settled by two xenophobic cultures where the teleportation system is likely to bring war. The two cultures are literary, like Giraut's home Occitan background, put together by scholars, based on the ancient Maya and Tamil.

In Earth Made of Glass, as exciting and inventive as A Million Open Doors, we learn a lot more about how the splintered human cultures came into being. This is basically because Giraut, as narrator, is no longer an enthusiastic adolescent from a planet recently recontacted, but an older diplomat who knows a great deal about the ways in which human beings interact. (This does not, of course, make him able to understand his wife.) The development of Giraut's personality is a strong part of the novel, a lot of his narrative being taken up with introspection about the changes within him, and it is very well done.

One of the major strengths of the novel, like its predecessor, is the portrayal of the two cultures. This is a more difficult task here, where both of them will be far less familiar to most Westerners than the machismo of Occitan and the Puritans of Caledon. The Tamil culture, in which most of the action takes place, is particularly well drawn. This has something to say for today, as these cultures know that they are doomed by the cultural and economic imperialism of the Interstellars, as distinct cultures today are threatened by the American way of life. We are today far more homogeneous than at almost any time in the history of the human race, and so much is lost to us as a result. To go into a Spanish bookshop, as I did fairly recently, to find that almost all the books for sale are translations of English bestsellers is a good illustration of this. It may be convenient, but it is impoverishing.

John Barnes: A Million Open Doors (1992)

Edition: Weidenfeld Military, 1993
Review number: 651

Each of John Barnes' novels to date has been different, each an excellent piece of science fiction. A Million Open Doors is based on a scenario similar to some of the ideas behind the Dorsai trilogy - the bringing together once more of the splintered subcultures into which the human race has developed after isolation on colony planets separated by interstellar space - while in tone it is reminiscent of the classic novels of Isaac Asimov (particularly Foundation) and Poul Anderson. It has rather more to say about culture shock than any of these novels, and contains interesting ideas I have never seen before, in over twenty years of avid science fiction reading.

As humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, the insularity of the various colonised planets has been increased by the use of invented cultures, exaggerations of Earthly ones. Now, however, the invention of an instant transportation method - which sets up the million open doors of the title - has ended their isolation. This is the background to the story of Giraut, an enthusiastic member of a culture based around the ideals of the medieval troubadours, a culture of art and literature, duelling and macho personal honour. The establishment of a gateway on the planet of Nou Occitan has led to the crumbling of this culture, as young people turn to the newly fashionable Interstellars who have abandoned Occitan ways for their idea of a pan-human lifestyle. (Occitan is another name for the Provencal language of the south of France in the middle ages.) When he discovers that his entendedora (a mixture between a teenage girlfriend and the object of a troubadour's affections) has been going to Interstellar sex clubs, he is in despair, and takes up an invitation to travel to Caledon as part of an ambassadorial team to help them deal with the imminent opening of a gateway on their planet.

Caledon is an almost complete contrast to Nou Occitan. It is a puritan culture on an Arctic world - one where terraforming was only partly carried out because suffering is good for the soul. The arts are dismissed as irrational, and the flamboyant Occitan culture is considered immoral. The clash between the two cultures is the central feature of the novel, with Giraut's development as a person connected to his realisation that the people of Caledon are human too, and that he can communicate with at least some of them.

A Million Open Doors is an excellent novel, based on interesting ideas drawn out with intelligence, with a believable background and convincing characters.

John Barnes: Orbital Resonance (1991)

Edition: Gollancz Millennium, 1998
Review number: 358

The front cover of this edition bears an endorsement from Orson Scott Card comparing Barnes to Robert Heinlein. On the basis of earlier Barnes novels, the John Brunner-like Mother of Storms and the brutal Kaleidoscope Century, this may seem rather a strange comparison to make. Yet Orbital Resonance is distinctly reminiscent of the best of Heinlein's books for teenagers, a tradition to which Card's own Ender's Game perhaps also belongs. (Orbital Resonance has a low-gravity game which is quite similar to that battle room in Ender's Game.

Set on a space station designed to aid the colonisation of Mars, the background to Orbital Resonance is a ruined Earth in only a few decades time. The satellite is the last bastion of the civilisation of mankind; there a group of gifted children are being conditioned to become the new elite of the human race. The novel takes the form of the journal of one of these children, Melpomene Murray, as they approach adulthood and a crisis in the form of a new arrival from Earth in their class.

Barnes also makes points about the way that the West lives today, by looking at how the relatively affluent children on the satellite see the lives of those remaining on Earth's surface, a place of continual famine and desperate want. Part of the school curriculum is a subject intended to enhance the children's understanding of and empathy for what is going on, yet they are virtually unaffected by the video footage, merely making such callous and stupid comments as "why don't they just grow more food?". They may be gifted, but they find it exceptionally difficult to understand any point of view different from the culture conditioned on them; another example is the complete incomprehension the narrator has as to why her word processor might possibly query the use of the word "clitoris" as "audience-inappropriate" (after all, girls on Earth must have them too).

Like Heinlein, Barnes manages to write convincingly as a bright teenage girl. (As a man in his thirties, I may not be the best judge of this, but he at least convinced me.) The sentimentality of Heinlein is absent, and Melpomene's crushing discovery of the years of manipulation at the hands of her parents is strongly handled.