Customer Reviews

Orbital Resonance

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the book that introduced many of us to John Barnes. For many of us, it is still our favorite. A lot of very "Barnesian" ideas are established here. For one thing, all of his books except for Mother of Storms and One for the Morning Glory are written in the first person. What probably hooked me more than anything else on his writing is that he chose to make his debut with a book written from the first person of a 13 year old girl. Personally, I can't think of any demographic that I have LESS in common with than teenage girls. And I certainly wouldn't attempt to write a novel from that perspective. Barnes has an incredible gift for putting himself in his characters' shoes and telling it from their point of view. Regardless of how radically different their personalities are, they always seem authentic. How the different personalities of Melpomene Murray, Currie Curran, Joshua Ali Quare and Giraut Leone could all spring from the same mind and all feel unique and authentic is a trick I'll certainly never master. (I guess that's why he's published and I'm not.) Comparisons to Ender's Game are appropriate. Even though Melpomene and Ender have very little in common, they are both written by superb authors who managed to authentically empathize with children.

Another precedent here is that he doesn't pull any punches. Melpomene is a 13 year old girl. Well, she's gonna face situations that a 13 year old girl would likely face, and she's going to deal with them the way a 13 year old girl realistically would. That means it might make you occasionally blush. (However, despite a certain reviewer's knee-jerk reaction, this is NOT a book about adolescent girls describing their orgasms.) But don't worry - when you graduate to "Kaleidescope Century", you'll get the same treatment from the point of view of a mercenary assassin. And yes, that book will SCARE you. But this is what makes his writing so powerful and authentic.

You're also going to find that John Barnes NEVER writes 1 dimensional characters, nor does he ever let them get the easy answers. There are no "good guys" and "bad guys" in his books. Well... OK, Kaleidescope Century has some pretty unredeemable people, and Phil and Monica from Candle are archetypal saints - but I suspect he's saving them for a full treatment in another novel. But on the whole, every character is going to do something you wouldn't be proud of at some point. And every character has some noble spark of humanity. You can't just divide up his characters into column A - the ones I don't like, and column B - the ones I like. Nope. Fortunately, they actually have personalities and relationships.

But Barnes's greatest strength is his world-building skill. He could have just said - in 2026, people will live on colonized asteroids because Earth is over-populated, and terraforming of Mars has begun. But.... no. The whole back story behind why the Flying Dutchman exists and why the people there live the way they do is extrapolated back to the end of the 20th century. At the end of the book, you know that all of the events here are part of a very logical flow of ideas in a very thoroughly thought out history. Nothing feels really contrived. At the same time - you know that you haven't heard the whole story yet. While Melpomene gives us considerable background on the situation on earth, ultimately that is not the story she was trying to tell. Two books later (Kaleidescope Century and Candle - which are not precisely sequels but do take place in the same universe) and we STILL don't have the whole picture, and the canvas keeps getting bigger!

Now, despite all the literary kudos, the most compelling reason to read this book is that it's simply a damn good fun read! Yeah, sure, essentially, it's "just" a well-written coming of age story. But what makes that a bad thing? I rarely read novels more than once. Why would I want to waste time on a book I've already read when there are so many more out there to discover? And I can count the books (or rather, series of books) I've read more than twice on just the fingers of one hand. With the recent publication of Candle in paperback, my thirst for John Barnes was rekindled. (pun deliberate, sorry!) To keep all the events straight in my mind, I just added Orbital Resonance and Kaleidescope Century to that prized list.

Now that with the end of the 1990s the scope of John Barnes's work has become clearer, it's possible to put his first "hit" novel, Orbital Resonance, into perspective. It's a very Heinleinesque SF novel about a spacebound culture told from the first-person perspective of a thirteen year old girl. It's also a coming-of-age story, but ... with a twist. It's a sort of an-entire-spaceship-coming-of-age story. If there's one pattern that Orbital Resonance begins to establish, it's Barnes's interest in cultural change and evolution and the planning thereof. (Sounds like Heinlein again, doesn't it?)

A well-written book that needs that "almost a short story" feel, Orbital Resonance is a good introduction to John Barnes. It won't give you much of a feel for what his longer books are like, but then again, they don't resemble one another all that much either.

All told, this was a fun book, and Barnes should be given lots of credit for writing from the viewpoint of a thirteen year old girl (which I can say from experience is one of the most self absorbed groups on the planet . . .) and making it utterly entertaining, he definitely pulls you into the world he's created and makes you care for his characters. What we have here is a future Earth that is being ravaged by diseases and wars and the usual stuff that always happens in the future, and so a lot of people have pulled themselves into an orbiting colony in an attempt to get above it all while the earth pulls itself together. Enter our protagonist, Mel (I won't even try to spell her whole name) who is concerned with the usual thirteen year old fascinations, puberty, boys, classwork and friends and . . . oh yeah, saving the world. Or at least getting ready to run it. But all of that seems almost secondary to the writings of this young girl, we get a peek into her and the life of teenagers and how their social pecking order works. Mel's a fascinating character, she loves her family, can act real annoying sometimes and alternates wallowing in angst and self congratulation. When her father admits that the kids are being conditioned psychologically to want to help save the world and run it, her reaction is quite realistic considering the circumstances and you can't help but feel for her. However, Barnes doesn't have much to say about the interactions of teenagers other than the usual amazement of how cruel and kind they can be to each other at the same time, most of the clique stuff you can see coming a mile off once the gears start rolling and that familiarity takes away from some of its emotional impact. Most of the adults except for maybe her father are ciphers, especially her mother. Still, her growing relationship with a boy she has a crush on is touching and does make you want to cheer her on, the scenes involving races are gripping, the science fiction is as good as it comes and Mel's writing can be aggravating, but it can also be moving and exciting at the same time. Some of the negative comments about this story I can't understand, the organism scene lasts for about three lines and is mentioned only one other time and being that teenage girls are teenage girls, is a valid subject for any novel about them, in my opinion. The things that struck me the most were the rather abrupt ending and the mental comparsions I kept making to Orson Card's classic, which this approaches but alas doesn't surpass or even equal. Taken on its own terms, it's a highly entertaining young adult novel in the vein of early Heinlein (which is the other author this reminds me of), swift and fun and maybe a little more sophisticated but not much more than that. Still he hasn't done a bad book yet and if you find this to your fancy, go read A Million Open Doors which is even better.

This book is a worthy addition to the sub-genre of SF which focuses on the young man or woman growing into themselves within a new frontier of space. It stands well alongside books like Heinlien's immortal "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" and "Space Cadet," Or Clarke's "Islands In The Sky." I have found it to be entertaining, stimulating and as good as anything written in SF in the past 5 years. Anyone who enjoys this particular sub-genre will enjoy Orbital Resonance immensely.

The most common themes that seem to emerge in Young Adult science fiction are the same that we face upon becoming adults: realising the world isn't as it seems, feeling the burden of responsibility, the way we begin to resent adults as we realise that they have to do things that are unpleasant, and that we ourselves will have to do things that we are not entirely comfortable with, during our passage to adulthood. John Barnes has addressed these themes in a stellar book that I think was intended for adults, but makes wonderful and enlightening reading for smart kids and young adults alike.

Melpomene is a young woman living on a corporate space-station who must deal with everday life like everyone else, its triumphs and its embarassments. She does well in school, has good status with her class-mates, but must deal with the embarassment she faces when her mother quits her station job (exposing her to be unproductive, not socially responsible, basically an oddity to everyone else on the station, an outsider) and spents all her time lounging round their apartment reading boring novels sent from earth. The story is told through Mel's journal entries, written in retrospect, and is an account of the arrival of a newcomer to the station: a boy from earth who has been shuffled around by unwanted relatives and is 'different', too earthlike, for the tastes of our mature, space-station reared class of children. With his arrival comes that of bullying, something that children on the space station haven't experienced before...

This book succeeds so well as young adult fiction because the characters are complex, there is no clear cut good and bad, and Melpomene faces adulthood sooner than she would like as her sense of fairness and her leadership qualities come into play, forcing her to take a responsible role that reveals the station's plans for her for the future. A discovery with which comes a jarring understanding of what it means to be an adult. In the tradition of Growing up Weightless and The Giver: a well-concieved, unusual and original read. Superb understanding of what it means to grow up, from one of the genre's best authors.

John Barnes assembles a vision of the future in the best tradition of true science fiction visionaries.

What happens if society decides to experiment on itself by altering the fundamental manner in which it raises its children, with the intent of producing vastly smarter and more responsible youngsters capable of entering the workforce at an earlier age with adult-like attitudes and skill sets that would make a modern college graduate green with envy? What happens to the adults upon whom the responsibility falls to raise the children in such a manner?

Whatever does happen, it had better work, because the Earth is failing rapidly as a result of ecological warfare on an unheard of scale, with the biosphere's state swinging first one way, then another.

Mankind needs new crews to man the great interplanetary transports that are hoped will be able to ship enough people off Earth and enough food back to keep everything from the brink of collapse, and the only way to get enough competent crew, crew who are willing to spend their lives in space and want to stay there, indeed, have every reason to stay there, are to raise them there, so that is their home from the beginning.

And how do you get a crew like that quicker than the 25 to 30 years a typical top-flight astronaut takes to develop? You take a new system of learning that completely revolutionizes the education process. The technical results are impressive, but the social results are interesting, to say the least.

The characters of the novel are the children of the experiment, and a few adults. For the most part, it is a coming of age story told anew, for it is a coming of age to adulthood far earlier than any children in history. It is told with bright-eyed clarity and absolute precision. The author tells of pre-adolescence from the point of view of those going through it.

The technology, its assumptions, and the society built by the expediency of need, and its assumptions, all drive the combination of assertions that create the knitted whole that is Orbital Resonance.

Those who are well-read enough to know of Alexi Panshin's book Rite of Passage (Nebula Award winner for best novel, 1969), will appreciate this book even more.

Orbital Resonance was a Nebula Award nominee for best novel, 1992.

If you're a fan of John Barnes and haven't read this book, it's about time you did. This book, more than any other, to me establishes his style of thinking, plotting, and writing.

The story is engaging; the characters are well-drawn; the setting is imaginative.

One of the things I like best about John Barnes is his ability to write science fiction novels that are actually about people the reader can identify with and care about, and Orbital Resonance is a good early example of that ability.

I start with this is a good book, not the best and not a must reader. But if you like Scifi at all this book is good. And it is true that he wrights like Robert Heinlein(the in your face way). I was not aware of this book being in a series, that just what i think it needs. What i have seen looks to me as if the second is not all that good, but this first book was not bad and even good so i will try the second one and get a review on.

Hypno signing off
3.6 Stars for Orbital Resonance

John Barnes is an amazing writer. This book creates an amazing universe that never seems to end.

Life aboard a space station is explored in many modern works of science fiction and most of them have two elements in common. First, there is little or no privacy. Living in close quarters with one's family and colleagues makes for a public life. Secondly, life in such closed environments leads to rigid social organization and extreme pressure toward conformity. With the technology available under these conditions someone will inevitably monitor the actions of others. Especially in space stations meant for long-term or life long inhabitation, leaders act as "Big Brother", able to see and monitor every move of the inhabitants.

Orbital Resonance by John Barnes includes all these elements but in a deceivingly benign manner. A group of humans have been selected to begin a new life in a space station away from a dying Earth. The initial colonizers, realizing the children are their hope for survival, use genetic engineering, electronic monitoring, and psychological manipulation to socialize and control the actions of their children. Life on the "Flying Dutchmen" requires conformity. This conformity is enforced via socialization of the young such that conformity is second nature; genetic tinkering is used to ensure that this socialization works. The children growing up on the "Flying Dutchman" are truly denizens of space, seeing Earth as a distant, foreign environment. They are completely different and alienated from their parents.

Finding out her life has been closely scripted whereby seemingly free choices were really genetically and psychologically predetermined does little to deter the teenage protagonist, Melpomene. Unfortunately Barnes does not use this strong character to question the cleverly inconspicuous totalitarian nature of the society he creates. Instead, Melpomene goes about her daily routines and the eventual climax has more to do with the unbreechable generation gap than it does with the social control exercised by her parent's generation. The story itself is rather bland but is saved by the interesting characters Barnes develops.

It is odd the lack of attention Barnes devotes toward the worst invasions of human dignity perpetrated by his characters. The children are genetically engineered with certain abilities and are psychologically manipulated to respond certain ways to stimuli. Yet little discussion of the moral or social implications of genetic engineering ensues. Melpomene's father rationalizes the actions of his generation as being necessary for the survival of humans and the children of the "Flying Dutchmen", seeing himself as a benevolent guardian of their future. The normative questions opened by this rationalization remain unexplored. This makes Orbital Resonance less satisfying.

Book Review by C. Douglas Baker