Sin of Origin (Isaac Asimov Presents) [Paperback]

Barnes (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 253 pages
• Publisher: Worldwide Library (February 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0373303076
• ISBN-13: 978-0373303076
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 3.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,205,994 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 Past mistakes..., July 14, 2001

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"nwc18" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sin of Origin (Isaac Asimov Presents) (Paperback)

Set almost a melenium in the future, in a universe where man has left a ruined Earth and is stratified into three distinct sects (The Christians, Communists, and Arabs) and has yet to encounter an "equivalent society", Barnes spins a captivating yarn on the freshly discovered world of Randall. In the Christian sphere of influence a world has been discovered where there are three intelegent species living in symbios. This is a great discovery for those who study alien life, since nothing of the sort has ever been encountered, but for the church there are more impotant considerations--such as converting the heathen aliens and opening the world to settlement.

Against what is a quite serious look at mankind's tendency to repeat his mistakes (It's been done before, yes, but Barnes does it quite well here) and a Resnick-like parable of 18th century European expansion (though focusing on the missionary aspect of it), Barnes has written an engrosing adventure novel that moves at quite a clip and is considerably more impressive than his first novel, The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky (not that that was a bad book by any stretch).

My one complaint would be a somewhat hasty ending--and looking at his first novel and other Asimov Presents that I've glanced at, which all clock in at 250 pages, I imagine that may have been forced by editorial guidelines. And while I'm mentioning editorial stuff: DON'T READ THE INTRODUCTION! Asimov blows a revelation that Barnes does his best to disguise for 240 pages.

Now go find it Barnes fans.