Customer Reviews

Kaleidoscope Century

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is a VERY good story about a VERY evil man. How do you become emotionally invested in a main character who is a rapist, murderer, KGB spy, and all around selfish bastard? The answer is here. I have no idea how an American KGB spy is made but chances are the answer is in this book.

It is the story about how Josh became a spy for the wrong side and did their dirty work--and let me assure you, the work is about as dirty as you will ever read. You become emotionally invested when you find out his father was an abusive drunk and his mother was a commie activist nut. No wonder he is such a basket case! In fact, this story would be a good text book in a "How to make an anti-hero" writing class.

The main story details his search for security (since he had none growing up). He never looks beyond himself. He has no love of communism, certainly no love of capitalism and not much love period. He is out for himself and the rest of the world can go to hell.

If the story interests you so far then read the book. It's a dark, fascinating, downward spiral into depravity. Quite frankly, you hate the main character but you keep reading to find out what happens to him at the end of the story. If, so far, this is not your kind of story, then don't read it. It's doubtful you will like it.

Not knowing much about John Barnes, I find it interesting that later on he worked with all-American Buzz Aldrin on some other projects making him a truly complex writer. Five stars for showing me something I've never seen before.

This book is, simply put, amazing. Barnes' vision of the future is dark and twisted, with a good bit of humor thrown in for good measure. Barnes also manages to take very technical theoritcal science ideas and put them into laymans terms and make the whole idea believable. As I said before, Amazing. Five Stars. Buy it. Today if you can.

As for the Reagan Foster Hinckley joke that one of the other reviewers didn't get, it goes like this: Ronald Reagan, former president of the United States from 1981 until 1989 was shot by John Hinckley, a madman who was in love with Jodie Foster, and was trying to prove it by killing the president. Hence Reagan Foster Hinckley.

It's the (not-so?) far future and Earth has been transformed into a battleground for viruses of the mind, commonly known as Memes with a capital M. Our hero and his fellow commandos work as mercenaries in the employ of one Meme or another, surfing through life as they struggle to re-create memories periodically lost to them--the price they pay for a secret treatment that gives them eternal youth. Can an all-American boy find love and happiness in a universe where an innocent conversation may leave you infected by a mind virus such as One True, doomed to spend the rest of your existence in its service? Not the tightest or best SF ever written, but a graphic illustration of one possible outcome of meme evolution.

--Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

Barnes' second novel in the Century series (unofficially titled the Century series, the books include Book #1: Orbital Resonance, Book #2: Kaleidoscope Century, Book #3: Candle, and Book #4: The Sky So Big and Black) is a harrowing and often unflattering depiction of an all too possible future in which one man, Joshua Ali Quare, wages a War of Self against circumstances that constantly threaten to kill him or destroy his identity in one way or another.

The first thing that must be addressed in this review is the other reviewers failure to understand the complexity and depth of the protagonist of this story, much as the other characters in this novel fail to truly understand him. Joshua Ali Quare's personality and actions, like every other human being that walks the face of this planet, are formulated by a combination of influences from environment, upbringing, and his own innate sense of self. His parents were fringe elements, his mother an african-american communist activist, his father a hard drinking "good old boy" white criminal with a violent streak and a gift for an eloquent turn of phrase. He is recruited by his mother's communist friends to act as a spy for the KGB/Organization within the U.S. military. As awful an act as this must seem to many readers, Josh tells us himself, "I grew up knowing that the United States had to fall eventually." This is not a patriotic American child. This is the child of revolutionaries, and he shows the resilient, pragmatic approach to life that revolutionaries have. He does commit despicable acts of murder and rape, but most of the time when he does these things he is under the influence of powerful psychotropic drugs. That he is a revolutionary terrorist is not to be disputed. The acts he performs are truly disgusting, but one must look at the whole picture before judging Joshua Ali Quare.

In the course of the book Josh leads many different lives under many different identities. His memory is erased and his age regressed every 15 years. The only information he has to connect him to the world and himself are the trinkets and words he has left behind, and as he himself puts it, he is not a good writer. Some of the lives Josh lives are positive, productive lives. But he is under no illusions. Everything move he makes is done in intelligent self interest, and he knows it. This does not mean however that he is a monster. He, as Shakespeare's character of Shylock so eloquently puts it, bleeds when he is pricked, cries when he is hurt, laughs when he loves.

The key to understanding this novel is to understand that in every person there is the potential for good and evil to some greater or lesser degree. Read the book with an open mind and you will see it as an interesting exploration of a sociopath's mind. It will also show you a future whose similarities to our own will disturb you, and it will open your mind to the possiblities of what can happen if one is true to oneself.

"Kaleidoscope Century" is the best dystopian, future-history fiction I've read in recent history. It rivals McHugh's "China Mountain Zhang". The story is about a man who periodically, and violently rejuvinates himself through the 21st century. The rejuvination wipes his concious memory of life prior to the event. Each time he rejuvinates, a new identity is setup to protect him. His personality is also subtly different from lift-to-life. He's not real good at keeping records, and historical data shows that his personal memoirs are "revisionist". Think of this as a Cyberpunk, Lazarus Long novel. Barnes is good, and getting better. This is his best to date. One complaint. The "timetravel twist" was not needed in this story. It needlessly complicated a twisty-enough yarn.

This is the book that introduced me to John Barnes.

Alot of negativity about this book, and I imagine much of it is well deserved. "Kaleidoscope Century" lacks a solid protagonist. The only character we have to latch onto is a complete sadist whose entire life is filled with committing acts of rape, murder in the name of....who knows what. Joshua Al Quarre is in it for no one but himself.

Lets face it. Barnes was having a bad couple of months while writing this book, but his genius shines through. Despite lacking in sympathetic major characters, Barnes blows through...well...a century of a very grim and plausible alternate future. Once the Memes show up (programs that are capable of re-writing the human mind), you are already blown away by this stunning and wildly inventive book.

"Kaleidoscope Century" is very short. I finished it in about four hours. But its a ride I tell you. If you can forgive heavily misanthropic themes and just enjoy the story, I guarantee you'll have a good time.

John Barnes writes a brilliant near future history with one of the nastiest anti-heroes I've ever seen as the central character. No punches are pulled in this book as the main character eventually winds up doing just about every brazen criminal act possible, from rape, assassination, and casual murder to engaging in planetary ecological warfare (delivering the weapons, of course, not developing them).

The concept of computer program viruses so intelligent that they can study other computer systems unknown to them, figure out how they work, reformat their virus to work on the new system and copy the virus into that foreign system for a takeover is made all the more chilling by the obvious corollary that the human mind is just another operating system to computer programs so awesomely sophisticated. I honestly found this refreshing in the extreme, quite the opposite pole from panty-waisted Star Trek episodes where computers 300+ years from now are frequently less sophisticated than the one I'm writing this review on.

In short, this book rocked! I've read it three times already, and while I've never grown to like the central character (he's a psycho killer who would make Hannibal Lechter sit up and blink), the setting and technological extrapolation combined with a plot that just won't quit brings me back time and again.