The Merchants of Souls [Mass Market Paperback]

John Barnes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 18, 2002

The sequel to A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass

Special agent Giraut Leones, betrayed by his superior and closest friend, swore he would never work for the Office of Special Projects again--but now he must. A new movement on Earth seeks to use the recorded personalities of the dead as helpless virtual reality playthings, and to the worlds of the Thousand Cultures--where the reborn are accepted as normal citizens--it's a monstrous crime. If Giraut cannot stop Earth from ratifying its plans, the tenuous structure of interstellar human civilization will collapse.

Complicating matters, Giraut's brain now hosts a second consciousness-the revived mind of his long-dead friend Raimbaut. Together, Giraut and Raimbaut must confront their shared past while struggling with a deadly present.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mysterious forces threaten humanity in this relatively weak third installment in Barnes's Thousand Cultures series (after 1998's Earth Made of Glass). Once again, composer Giraut Leones, secret agent for the intergalactic Office of Special Projects, is in the thick of things. In the Thousand Cultures, people periodically record the contents of their minds on a device called a psypyx. When they die, their psypyx is stored until someone is willing to share their brain with the deceased. After two years, the dead person's mind is reanimated in a cloned body. Unfortunately, on Earth, where most people inhabit virtual reality simulations, someone has the idea of converting these stored personalities into what are essentially computer games that would force helpless, disembodied humans to be other people's playthings. Most citizens of the Thousand Cultures react to this proposal with horror. Though still recovering from a painful divorce, Giraut volunteers to carry the mind of a dead friend to Earth, and help lead a campaign to turn public opinion against the monstrous idea. As usual, Barnes's writerly nuts and bolts are firmly in place: well-developed characters, well-wrought environments like sterile, intellectually incestuous Earth, where anything can be discussed but nothing has meaning. Moreover, his conception of sharing one's brain with a separate personality is persuasive. Unfortunately, the novel bogs down in talk, and too many important events, including the discovery and punishment of the villains, occur off stage. Barnes is generally near the top of the SF world, but this one disappoints. (Dec. 19)with Tiber and The Return.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

When the pleasure-seeking inhabitants of Earth attempt to download recordings of the personalities of deceased individuals for recreational purposes, the Office of Special Projects enlists its best agents, Giraut and Margaret Leones, to stop the process. Recently divorced and unsure of their relationship, they find themselves at the center of a controversial web of political and galactic intrigue that threatens the future of humanity throughout the universe. Returning to the far-future world of A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass, Barnes elaborates on his vision of a multicultural universe filled with diverse and often conflicting societies. Strong characters and exotic backgrounds add depth to this inventive tale of fast-paced action and subtle manipulations. For most sf collections.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Tor Science Fiction; 1st edition (November 18, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812589696
• ISBN-13: 978-0812589696
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,188,353 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:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very human story, July 26, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Merchants of Souls (Hardcover)

Unlike the other reviewers of this book, I found the obviously deeply personal involvement in the plot of this book to parallel the attitudes and observations of our hero, Giraut. There is a deep synergy, to me, between the writing style, the character's emotions, and the plot of the book. Very different from the first book of the series and similar in style to the second, I was amazed at the depth and clarity provided by the dual personalities in the main character and the time spent reviewing what made the protagonist who he was. Certainly not typical sci-fi, it may be hard-to-swallow for a person looking for futuristic adventure. As existential fiction, however, it seemed right-on.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading for Barnes fans...., November 15, 2001

By 

Jake Crymes (Portland, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Merchants of Souls (Hardcover)

My biggest problem with this third installment in the Giraut series was the nebulous plot. Initially Barnes spends a majority of the prose characterizing Occitan's unique culture and the friendship between Giraut and his psypyx/dead jovent friend Raimbaut who's been revived, ostensibly to testify before the Council of Humanity about the potential 'abuse by entertainment' of these stored souls, essentially attempting to grant citizenship to them. Fine and dandy.

The second half of the book seems to focus almost exclusively on the inexplicable young love between Raimbaut and Laprada, a member of the Council and a freshly recruited OCP agent to boot, as well as a chronically depressed, bipolar mess of a person. This whole plot 'twist' seemed contrived and muddled to me. It overshadows the supposed climax of the book, which in its entirety, takes place in a mere twenty pages at the conclusion of the book. Very hurried, and nothing like the Caledony story seen in A Million Open Doors, for example.

Overall, while I can't say that this book was a disappointment (I did buy the uncorrected proof before it actually came out in hardback!), I would consider it the weakest of the three. The Thousand Cultures is a fasinating milieu, and other Barnes efforts such as Candle proove that he's one of the most creative sci-fi authors out there. Let's hope he uses this book as a stepping stone for bigger and better things for Leones in the future!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Very weak entry in the series, April 26, 2006

By 

Michael K. Smith (South Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Merchants of Souls (Hardcover)

This is the third in the series, and the weakest entry so far. It begins immediately after the end of the second book, with the OSP having to deal with the political ramifications accompanying the shocking loss of an entire world, and with Giraut having to deal with being used by his friend and boss, Shan -- although Giraut seems to react pretty emotionally for an intelligence agent. In fact, only the last third of the book contains any amount of action or plot. The first two-thirds is divided between back-story -- how Giraut acquired his close group of friends in boarding school, plus a series of isolated anecdotes (mostly involving his wife, Margaret) set in the decade between the first and second books -- and a deep psychological dissection of what it's like to have a dead friend's personality living in the back of your brain for a couple of years while his cloned body is grown and made ready for his reoccupation. Barnes also uses the rather thin ostensible plot -- protecting these "canned" personalities from commercial exploitation for entertainment purposes -- as an excuse to explore Earth's own society, and to show that it's just as bizarre as any frontier world in human-occupied space. While all this is fascinating in itself, it doesn't make for much of a story. And when the real action begins, with a very public assassination, the plot that unfolds turns out to have had nothing whatever to do with anything we were told earlier in the book. Talk about left field!