Customer Reviews

Earth Made of Glass

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I have to say, after reading "A Million Open Doors," I had high hopes for this sequel. And sorry to say, I was disappointed. Maybe I'd just read too many of Barnes's book in a row (this was about the fifth), but I just wanted Giraut & Co. to get on with it--and I just couldn't believe he was so dense about his relationship with his wife.

The cultural stuff was interesting, and more to the point, convincing, but the story dragged a lot.

But I'm still a fan of the author, no doubt about it.

When it comes to re-reading books, this one isn't likely to make it on my list.

The one thing that you can unequivocally say about John Barnes is that he has exciting ideas. Great, wonderful concepts that if properly executed would form some classic sci fi novels. The disappointing part is that he tends to fall flat on his face when it's time for execution. Especially disappointing are his endings and how he tends to rush through them.

The concepts of A Million Open Doors were very promising. Humanity spreading out and colonizing worlds. Loss of communication between the colony worlds. New technology making instanteous travel possible. Earth Made of Glass is based on these same concepts, with a subplot of a marriage somehow gone wrong tied in. It's with that whole subplot that this story degenerates from an exciting tale of cultural prejudice and how technology is stirring up the pot into a story of how two people can no longer relate to each other. I'm not saying that this doesn't belong in a sci fi story. I'm saying that Barnes' inability to execute that subplot well drags the entire rest of the book down the drain.

I thought the first 100 pages of this book were GREAT! Very exciting, getting to learn about new cultures and how the instantaneous travel technology was affecting their relations. Then, Barnes goes into his standard "I will philosophize them relentlessly and they will understand the world better" mode. For example, three pages of the prophet Ix explaining while it is better to love rather than to hate is a bit much.

I wish that Barnes would collaborate with someone who would teach him to take himself a little less seriously. Also, it would be great if he could get an editor who would correct his grammer and style. My pet peeve, in addition to the grammer gaffs noted in other posts, is that Barnes uses parentheses in the speeches given by characters... how the heck does that make it past an editor? We're not talking about a character whispering an aside to someone during his conversation -- we're talking about an integral part of a speech given by a character!

All in all, the most disappointing part of this novel is the rushed ending. Barnes rolls out all kinds of different technology, revelations about the personal lives of characters, etc, etc in the last few pages to wrap up some dilemmas.

I love that Barnes doesn't take the easy way out for his characters -- not everything is beautiful in their lives at the end of the book. I just wish that he could do a better job in writing about his ideas.

In Earth Made of Glass, a sequel to A Million Open Doors, Giraut and Margaret are sent to the hostile planet Briand, where two artificial human cultures have been forced to live together. One is based on Tamil literature, the other on Mayan culture. The two peoples hate each other bitterly.

Giraut and Margaret's team try to work with some of the "good people" with the on-planet culture, people who are trying to work for peace. But at the same time serious stresses are showing in Giraut and Margaret's marriage. The two crises come to a head at much the same time.

The novel is full of neat inventions, and the cultures are intriguingly portrayed. I also felt that the depiction of a decaying marriage was very well done, and very believable. I found the depiction of the cultural difficulties a bit less believable: dependent on people established as good acting quite evilly. Perhaps I am simply too much of an optimist, but I was not convinced.

Interesting, ambitious, but not quite successful.

Barnes tries to do a lot of things in this book and I found it essentially engrossing. It got better and better as it went along. A welcome change from a lot of fare. I have not read _A Million Open Doors_ , and therefore was not familiar with Giraut and Margaret's personalities. Like another reader I found Margaret very irritating for more than half the book. That reviewer called her a "revenge" character and I agree. Poor, without-a-clue Giraut. Of course her affair with the Tamil assistant was obvious. Even the other characters found Giraut's obtuseness disgusting. Barnes finally does give us some more believable explanations for Margaret's behavior.

I found the Ix character to be a bit too conveniently Christlike. As for the woman he ruins his Messiah mission for, well she did everything but take center stage and sing, "I don't know how to love him." Barnes' description and interplay of the two societies in conflict is the single riveting aspect of the book for me even though the Israeli/Palestinian parallels were pretty obvious. I admit I could not fathom welcoming ceremonies held outdoors in such a climate, plus that architecture must have been made from something amazing to remain like new under centuries of constant solar inferno and savage weathering.

I had recently read _The Doomsday Book_ and _In the Garden of Iden_. Although those were based on real historical periods, I still found parallels. _Earth Made of Glass_ also has this hugely superior human group essentially viewing the studied cultures as primitive in outlook and ultimately expendable. At the same time the tiny number of "visitors" who actually interact with the individuals in these "lesser" societies form inevitable attachments, and acquire valuable insight despite their condescension. There are small hints that somewhere in the series(?), Barnes' will have his Council of Humanity at least explore the idea that a totally homogenized human society isn't necessarily the stronger entity they see as better prepared to face a superior alien culture. There might just be some essential knowledge, skill, or zest-for-life they are eradicating with their methods.

Like another reviewer, I look forward to Barnes exploring the discovered alien sites, or encountering the aliens themselves, (preferably before Barnes' creativity runs out of steam). I suspect we are at least going to visit that group of societies on the rim who have also refused a Springer.

I started to read this, saw how good it was, stopped so I could read "A Million Open Doors" first (wise decision) and then went on. The two books together gave me tremendous pleasure. "Earth Made of Glass" was a page turner for me, partly because I became very engaged with the troubled, interesting characters - Giraut, Margaret, Kapilar. The book also draws a fascinating portrait of a prophet -- Ix -- although he was almost too saintly to believe, I could understand him and the power he had over others. These two books put John Barnes on my "must read" list.

As always John Barnes bring us into a fascinating future world which is very realistic, build up upon real facts and cleverly constructed fiction. This book provides the reader with an option to think over about the world, not even the one that is being described in the book. J. Barnes learns us how to think about the present world from many points of view just by entertainlingly shifting us into a fantastic world.
I think if more peoples on this world would be reading such books the world would look better already...

This sequel begins twelve years after the end of the first volume (in what now appears to be a planned series of five). Giraut and Margaret have been professional diplomats for more than a decade, on a number of worlds, and in situations that varied from tedious to way too exciting. They specialize -- officially -- in culture and tourism, and they know how to do their jobs, but this time that won't be enough. Because they are also agents for the Office of Special Projects, a shadowy bureau whose job is to reunite far-flung humanity in preparation for the inevitable first contact with aliens (whom two dozen known artifacts demonstrate are definitely out there). Briand is a frontier world with only two cultures, both of them "artificial": A Tamil city filled with ornate temples where everything revolves around the traditional medieval literature of south India, and a Mayan city, also filled with temples, where everything is as close as possible to the traditional subsistence agricultural society of ancient Central America. No problem -- except volcanic eruptions have forced the two to share a much small space than originally intended and centuries of increasingly violent ethnic hatred are proving impossible to overcome. The story gets darker as it progresses and the not-happy ending is extremely pessimistic. Or maybe just realistic. In addition to Barnes's proven anthropological talents, there's a lot of personal psychology here, too, as Margaret finds she can't come to terms with her husband's nostalgia for his lost youth and seeks solace elsewhere. (Which comes as a shock to Giraut, though it was telegraphed to the reader pretty early.) In fact, one of the overarching themes of this volume is betrayal: Personal, professional, political, and ethnic. I'm happy to say, in any case, that this one doesn't suffer from "sequelitis." And I've already started on the third volume.