Finity [Mass Market Paperback]

John Barnes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1999

A professor living in Auckland in a Reich-dominated world is recruited for private industry by a mysterious industrialist. Whenever he and his friends try to even think about the United States, it seems someone is trying to stop them--and even kill them.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Finity, John Barnes starts with the premise that Hitler won World War II, but that's not the only curious thing that's going on in his world. Earth in 2063 is filled with intelligent cars and personal ballistic transports, but the United States has vanished from humanity's collective memory. Like everyone else, Lyle Peripart isn't even aware that he's forgotten about the U.S., until the enigmatic tycoon Geoffrey Iphwin offers him a job and tries to bring it up in conversation. Iphwin thinks that Lyle's specialty, abductive reasoning, might be the key to solving the mystery, and he's not alone.

Lyle soon finds himself observed by strange Nazi spies and the target of several murder attempts, but he also discovers some unexpected aces in his sleeve: his fiancée turns into a deadly pistoleer when needed, though she doesn't seem to remember it! And he suddenly finds himself in possession of a cat named Fluffy. While Finity isn't Barnes' best effort, it's an intriguing and entertaining "What if?" adventure that keeps the action coming and the pages turning. --Craig E. Engler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Have you ever had a clear memory of an event that was directly at odds with what someone else remembers? Have you and your spouse ever argued over where you first met or when you first kissed? In this latest novel by the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated author of Earth Made of Glass and Mother of Storms, conflicting memories abound, because here there are millions, perhaps billions of alternate universes, each only slightly different from those that lie closest to it. Throughout history, it seems, people have tended to slip back and forth between adjacent universes. Now, however, the slippage is drastically increasing. A young woman calls home and, halfway through the call, discovers that her mother no longer knows her. When she leaves the phone booth, the entire history of the world has changed radically. An astronomer on a job interview spends the day with a mysterious billionaire before meeting his historian girlfriend for dinner, only to find that she believes that she's spent much of the day with him. At the restaurant someone attempts to murder the astronomer, but his girlfriend, suddenly transformed into a gun-toting secret agent, shoots the attacker. At least that's how he remembers it, but the body on the floor isn't the person he saw shot. Barnes has great fun fooling around with a variety of unexpected alternate universes in this clever scientific adventure novel. Occasionally the momentum slows as various characters explain the physics behind what's going on, but in general this is a well-paced book, full of nicely drawn characters and a number of tantalizing mysteries that should greatly appeal to fans of alternate historical fiction.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1 Mass Mkt edition (December 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812571452
• ISBN-13: 978-0812571455
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,285,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Competently executed; indifferent result, May 31, 2000

By 

joe_n_bloe (Ester AK USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Finity (Mass Market Paperback)

While John Barnes has written a number of simply outstanding books (Mother of Storms, One for the Morning Glory), this Pohl-esque entry into the alternate worlds genre isn't one of them.

Finity gets off to a good start. The (first-person) narrator speaks in stilted, self-centered prose like, perhaps, a character from a R.A. Lafferty novel. It becomes apparent, after a while, that he inhabits a world that seems to have a changing past. Not only that but this changing past seems to be different for everyone. And then there is the matter of the United States having gone missing.

It's an interesting premise until it turns into a road trip. Then the story begins leaking steam. One of the characters turns out to be a red herring. (Or something very much like a red herring.) People you've just begun to know turn out to be expendable or not around for all that long for other reasons.

The mess is polished off with a couple of dream sequences that might have been adapted from the rendezvous of Picard and Kirk (well, not really, but ...). Quirks of physics and mathematics explain everything away.

Overall, underwhelming. Not a bad book to be stuck on an airplane with (which is where I read most of it) but there's better reading to be had. Much of it, in fact, with Barnes's own name on it!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars parallel to a good read, August 2, 2003

By 

rob (London, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Finity (Hardcover)

Somewhere out there in a a parallel world a version of me enjoyed a better version of this book - one in which interesting characters cleverly outwit sinister adversaries without resorting to the scientific version of "it was all a dream". To be fair - the story started well, has some nice ideas, but doesn't go anywhere. Perhaps like the citizens of America it should have sought a happier future.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Parallel Worlds and Mind-Boggling Physics..., December 11, 2001

By 

Jonathan Burgoine "bookseller" (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Finity (Mass Market Paperback)

The notion of parallel worlds is not one that science fiction fans find hard to digest. In Barnes' "Finity," we find ourselves on a world where the Nazi's won WW-II, America fell, and communities of "Expat" Americans live elsewhere.

Enter Lyle, the main character of the story, an expat professor, whose life is about to take a turn for the... parallel.

Barnes' style is great, and the plot is replete with substance and fantastic ideas. Lyle watches in total confusion as his wife seems to transform from the woman he loves to a trained military soldier - in the blink of an eye. Likewise, the entirety of his world seems to start functioning this way: people are of one sort one second, then change to have different memories from what might be a parallel universe the next.

As Lyle is hired by a mysterious organization to attempt to unravel this confusing situation, things get even more confusing: no matter who they interview, no one seems to come from a world where America still stands. And so, the terrified professor and a team of remarkable characters head off for just that place: what is there? I won't ruin it - refuse to ruin it.

Now, all that said, the quantum physics in this book was a tad overwhelming for the amateur such as myself. I had to read passages a few times to wrap my head around the explanations of what was happening (when, to be honest, a 'dumbed-down' version would have sufficed in my mind). So, the novel has a bit of "work" to it: this is not brain-candy SF, it's SF you'll have to think, learn, and process.

Lyle is a lackluster hero, a normal joe-average, and that can also get a little frustrating at points, especially since everyone else seems so qualified and important, and you start to wonder why anyone wanted him on this mission in the first place.

Despite those two failings, the book was quite good, and I enjoyed it. I'm not sure I'll be re-reading it anytime soon (and if I do, I'll skip the physics lessons), but it was defitely a worthwhile read.

'Nathan