Kaleidoscope Century [Paperback]

John Barnes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 1996

Joshua is infected with a virus that ensures that for every 15 years he lives, he gains ten. After each period of coma he wakes with his memory wiped and puts together the lost years with the hypertext messages his past personas have left, but nothing can prepare him for being hunted.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A stunning evocation of humanity's violent downward slide, Barnes's fourth SF novel is set on Mars during the early part of the 22nd century, in a universe chimerically similar to that of his first, Orbital Resonance. The novel consists primarily of a series of escapades undertaken by narrator Joshua Ali Quare, whose violent career path under the aegis of the Organization, a successor group to a super-efficient amalgam of KGB/Communist Party, is the ultra-leftist equivalent of many Heinlein protagonists. Born in 1968, Joshua had been recruited by the KGB in the late 20th century, which infected him with a virus that incapacitates him in a near-coma every 15 years, from which he awakens, rejuvenated, 10 years younger each time, but nearly amnesiac. Joshua has been ruthless in pursuit of his missions, most of which have concerned scientific discoveries. Like others around him, he has lost almost all human feeling: he voices only the occasional expression of regret after "serbing" a sorority or defiling his father's grave. The environment Barnes creates is appalling: Josh and his cohort-in-crime, Sadi, appear to delight in their repeated antisocial actions and attitudes. Josh spouts such homilies as "if you don't want a brain to think the wrong thoughts, the surest way is to put a hole in it." Whether or not one is put off by the pervasive cynical mentality, as a picture of the degradation of society in the 22nd century, the novel is gripping.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In Barnes's latest, a tailored virus allows a man to live for centuries.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: Gollancz (February 5, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1857996496
• ISBN-13: 978-1857996494
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,935,270 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

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece -- but a bummer, July 27, 1998

By 

Glenn H. Reynolds "Instapundit" (Knoxville, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kaleidoscope Century (Mass Market Paperback)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Complex, challenging and excellent, August 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Kaleidoscope Century (Mass Market Paperback)

Unfortunately, most of the customer reviewers missed the entire point of this book. Even more unfortunately, to correct them requires spoiling the flash of excitement and pleasure when the reader realizes what is going on here.

This is a very Heinleinesque - high praise! - story of The Man Who Learned Better. Yes, it's very grim, because the world described is not merely dystopian, but apocalyptic.

Now for the clues, for those who didn't get it, or didn't finish it (stop here if you haven't read it yet!):

1) This is a time travel novel.

2) The reason the main character remembers different events differently is not that his records are faulty, but that he has experienced them multiple times, in different timelines.

3) The characters aren't merely unlikable - one of them is a psychpath!

4) The first time around, things were terrible, because the psychopath was the one who was travelling in time and arranging things to her liking.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars People Just Don't Get John Barnes., March 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Kaleidoscope Century (Mass Market Paperback)

It's gonna be tricky doing this one justice in just 1,000 words...

Barnes doesn't write "Nice" books where everybody lives happily ever after. And this is clearly his ugliest and most controversial book to date. Like all good science fiction, he takes some scientific principles, and imagines a world where they are in a different balance from the familiar. His genius lies in his ability to extrapolate a frighteningly accurate picture of the people who might inhabit such a place. When the place gets ugly, what do you think his characters are going to be like?

This is a DARK book. The main character is an American child of a militant communist mother and a wife-beating father. He's abused, disabused, and then recruited by the KGB as a spy. When a rapid-fire string of apocalytic diseases and wars fought by successively deadlier technology leave the world order upside down, what do you think the life of such a mercenary will be like? And I haven't even mentioned the Memes yet!

NOT for the squeamish. The violence is dirty and the sex is worse. You will want to take a bath when you're done. But if you can take the heat, prepare to have your socks blown off.