Earth Made of Glass [Import] [Paperback]

John Barnes (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Millennium; New Edition edition (1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0752816586
• ISBN-13: 978-0752816586
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)

More About the Author

My thirtieth commercially published novel will be coming out in spring 2012. I've published about 4 million words that I got paid for. So I'm an abundantly published very obscure writer.

I used to teach in the Communication and Theatre program at Western State College. I got my PhD at Pitt in the early 90s, masters degrees at U of Montana in the mid 80s, bachelors at Washington University in the 70s; worked for Middle South Services in New Orleans in the early 80s. I do paid blogging mostly about the math of marketing analysis at TheCMOSite and All Analytics. If any of that is familiar to you, then yes, I am THAT John Barnes.

There are also many Johns Barneses I am not. I am not the British footballer, the Australian rules footballer, the former Red Sox pitcher, the Tory MP, the expert on ADA programming, the biographer of Eva Peron, the authority on Dante, the mycologist, the travel writer, the guy who does some form of massage healing that I don't really understand at all, the oil executive, the film historian, or that guy that Mom said was my father. I do wish I'd written that book on titmice, though.

I used to think I was the only paid consulting statistical semiotician for business and industry in the world, but I now know four of them. So now I have a large market share of a growing field.

Semiotics is pretty much what Louis Armstrong said about jazz, except jazz paid a lot better for him than semiotics does for me. If you're trying to place me in the semiosphere, I am a Peircean (the sign is three parts, ), a Lotmanian (art, culture, and mind are all populations of those tripartite signs) and a statistician (the mathematical structures and forms that can be found within those populations of signs are the source of meaning). The branch in which I do consulting work is the mathematics and statistics of large populations of signs, which has applications in marketing, poll analysis, and annoying the literary theorists who want to keep semiotics all to themselves.

I have been married three times, and divorced twice, and I believe that's quite enough in both categories. I'm a hobby cook, sometime theatre artist, and still going through the motions after many years in martial arts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A disappointing sequel to "A Million Open Doors.", June 21, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Earth Made of Glass (Paperback)

This one has none of the charm of its predecessor, and the central conceit of the book -- that humans are populating the galaxy with designer cultures concocted by scholarly fanatics -- here seems much less believable. Our heroes, Giraut and Margaret, are assigned to an inhospitable planet to defuse a cultural war, but they mostly just kill time while events take place around them, and their marital problems make a dreary subplot, hinging as they do on a "surprise" that most readers will see coming a long way off.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Uneven but great successor to "A Million Open Doors", March 22, 1998

By 

Patrick E. Oneil "Patrick E. O'Neil" (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Earth Made of Glass (Hardcover)

This book is a successor to "A Million Open Doors" with continuing characters: Giraut Leones, Margaret Leones, and Shan (chief of their agency which wants to bring together all the 1000 world societies to meet the aliens whose ruins they keep finding). Giraut and Margaret are on a new world, a high-gravity, hot, hostile environment with two cultures who hate each other. There are two major plots going on at once. In the first, one of the societies had put up a Prophet named Ix who preaches peace between the two cultures. I am not easily impressed by such things, but I had tears in my eyes several times as I read about him and things he said. I thought it was as beautiful as some of Christ's parables. The other plot is about the difficult marriage Giraut and Margaret are having. Barnes ABSOLUTELY avoids any easy answers, and I was impressed with the whole work. The uneveness problem arose from a few things: (1) the plot took a while to get interesting, maybe 100 pages; (2) there are frequent non-grammatical constructs of a certain type: "...to Margaret and I...," for example, and it is a little annoying. But the man is a genius in writing a moving story!

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Characters need a good shake, September 24, 1999

By 

Scott Ellsworth (Lake Forest, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Earth Made of Glass (Paperback)

I liked Barnes work enough to get his entire catalog on the basis of Mother of Storms. Reading this made me consider never buying another one of his books again, as I cannot trust his endings. I found the background interesting, which is why it got two stars rather than one, but the moronic behavior of Margaret and the insipid behavior of Giraut turned an interesting pair of characters into a set piece in which you wanted to shake them both and demand that they grow up.

Marital troubles are nothing to sneeze at, and well used, they can drive a story. He wrote the interaction well enough that I had a strong response, but the response was to want the characters, everyone they knew, and everywhere they went melted to slag. They were less interesting people than in the first book, and became progressively more annoying as time went on.

I could have handled any of the uplifting ending possibilities where character growth took place. Depending on that growth, they could have either worked it out, or not. Instead, they came to a resolution that was thoroughly unsatisfying, leaving me to ask not only why I invested the time to read about these people, but why I spent the time to read the earlier book. I want those hours back!

In consequence, I can reccomend neither as worth your time, since this is the resolution chosen to what was done the first time around.