The Sky So Big and Black [Hardcover]

John Barnes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 2002

At the end of the twenty-first century, Earth is under the control of a single intelligence, the apparently benign One True. Mars, meanwhile, is slowly terraforming, and the human settlers there are still free of One True's control...but they need a pressure suits to survive outside, and it will be a century or more before the planet's fit for terrestrial life.

Terpsichore Murray is growing up on Mars. She wants to quit school and become, like her father, an ecoprospector. He has other ideas: he wants her to stay in school. He does want her along on his next long trip but only to conduct a group of younger kids from the highlands at Mars's equator back to school in Wells City.

What happens next will change Terpsichore, will change Mars, and will open the door to a new chapter in the history of intelligent beings in the solar system . . . all of them.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"They don't make 'em like that any more!" say fans of the classic juvenile SF novels, Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage (1968) and the run of Robert A. Heinlein novels that begins with Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) and ends with Podkayne of Mars (1963). Except--John Barnes has made one like that: The Sky So Big and Black. The book's brilliant teenage protagonist, hard science, brisk pace, didactic moments, and strong characterization make it clear that Barnes is working consciously in the tradition of Panshin and Heinlein (especially Heinlein's Red Planet [1949] and Podkayne of Mars). Like his models, Barnes does a superb job. The Sky So Big and Black is a classic. Read it, and give it to any smart, perhaps-outcast young reader whom you want to infect with the science fiction meme.

Terpsichore "Teri" Murray lives on Mars, an eco-prospector-in-training and the daughter of a widowed ecospector. Instead of gold, ecospectors seek underground rivers and gas pockets, which they blast to the Martian surface in hopes of earning fabulous wealth. The ecospector life is hard, primitive, dangerous, and perhaps doomed to extinction, as the Martian atmosphere thickens and the genetically engineered "Mars-form" humans increase their population. An Earth-form human, Teri doesn't want to give up ecospecting, which she loves as much as she hates the city and school where she's forced to spend part of every year. But she finds herself with new, far more ominous worries when a devastating planetwide disaster isolates the colonies from one another, strands Teri in the Martian outback with several injured young children, and opens the entire planet to attack by One True, the collective intelligence that rules Earth in a terrifyingly total dictatorship. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

Barnes (Candle) is up to his old tricks in creating a sharp novel that is not about who or what readers will think it is and that comes with a perfect, unexpected ending. Teri-Mel, a human growing up on the harsh, wild frontier of Mars, is in trouble the kind of trouble a special shrink has to deal with. As the doctor plays recordings of previous sessions with Teri-Mel, he discovers that even listening to her story can have unexpected consequences. Circling around an unnamed tragedy, the recordings tell of life in a spacesuit on the unprotected surface of Mars, "ecospecting" with her father to help make the planet fully habitable. They reveal a rough girl maturing into "Full Adult" status both legally and emotionally. Teri's future is uncertain: though she may get rich from a big ecospecting "scorehole," she may have to return to dreaded CSL school, while her fiance is becoming increasingly distant. As always, Barnes's characters are beautifully natural. His sense of how the conditions of a place can create a culture and individual sensibilities is outstanding, and here he even allows his slang to evolve. Readers new to Barnes's work may be a bit confused by the ever present threat of One-True the computer virus that has taken over the minds of the inhabitants of Earth but enough information about it is leaked over time for them to catch on. As with every work by Barnes, this book should be read by anyone interested in vivid near-future worlds, engaging characters and moral questions with no simple answers.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (August 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765303035
• ISBN-13: 978-0765303035
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,545,478 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

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Barnes' best so far, September 9, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sky So Big and Black (Hardcover)

This book continues both the Meme Wars arc from Candle, and the off-Earth arc from Orbital Resonance. We follow young Teri Murray and her father around on Mars, as ecological prospectors. The characters are wonderful and the setting is gorgeous.

Most other Barnes books include at least one instance of utter personal brutality, and I was pleased to see that this one doesn't. They are all good books, but Mother of Storms and Kaleidoscope Century both made me want to throw up.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First rate novel of terraforming Mars and disaster, March 22, 2003

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sky So Big and Black (Hardcover)

The Sky So Big and Black is a first-rate novel, clearly a Hugo contender in my view. It's scary at times, sweet at times, it presents a fascinating social structure, and some excellent SFnal speculation about terraforming Mars. And it features one of the scariest SFnal ideas since Vernor Vinge's "Focus" (in A Deepness in the Sky).

It is very well structured, presented as a psychologist listening to a series of interviews he did with Teri-Mel Murray, a young woman on Mars who was working with her father as an "ecospector". It's clear from the start that something terrible happened, and indeed that the psychologist was forced to erase Teri-Mel's memory. It's also clear that he likes her a lot, and is really torn up by what has happened, and worried that he may have to treat her again, for some mysterious reason that takes a long time to become clear. The interviews tell of Teri and her father travelling across the lightly terraformed planet to a "Gather" of the "rounditachis", people who live more or less in the open on Mars, working to help advance the terraforming. Teri is hoping that she will be certified a "Full Adult" at the Gather, and be free to marry her boyfriend. Her father wants her to go back to school for one more year, because he's not convinced that ecospecting will remain a good living. As they travel, they plan to make one more attempt at a big "scorehole". And Teri is starting to worry about her boyfriend.

All the above is cute stuff, and interleaved with neat SFnal details about the terraforming of Mars. In the background lurk details about the future history up to this point, especially the takeover of ecologically ravaged Earth by a "meme" called "One True", or "Resuna", which more or less has turned Earth's population into a hive mind. Also we learn bits and pieces about the psychologist's feelings, which give us hints about the disaster which has clearly occurred. So it's a scary book, as we learn to like Teri more and more, while we just know that she's going to get hurt real real bad. And when the crisis comes, it's exciting, and terribly sad, and even scarier than I had first expected. The resolution is moving, real, and and open-ended.

Barnes' future is on the one hand full of hope, and of cool SFnal stuff, and on the other had it is very very scary, and much of it dominated by something purely evil, yet not sneeringly evil. I should note that this is a sequel to three earlier novels: Orbital Resonance, Kaleidoscope Century, and Candle. But it reads just fine alone.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good stuff in the Heinlein tradition, May 15, 2003

By 

Michael Pusateri (South Pasadena, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sky So Big and Black (Hardcover)

I've enjoyed John Barnes's novels for a while now. This novel takes place in the future laid out in the previous novels Kaleidoscope Century and Candle. In this future, the concept of Memes that can control the human mind are central to the story. They aren't memes like an idea that spreads across the internet and becomes part of the culture. We are talking about the concept of a method by which a Meme can take over and control a human mind.

In Barnes's future, the Earth is completely taken over by the Meme called One True. The rest of humanity, spread out in space on the Moon and on Mars try to make do without the Earth.

This story takes place on Mars with a group of ecospectors, ecological prospectors. Rather than hunting for valuable minerals, they hunt for ways to terraform Mars by releasing water or identifying other organic resources.

Mars is cast in the light of the seminal Heinlein Libertarian society. Few laws, much personable responsibility, and a huge focus on trust and reputation. It very much harks back to ideas from Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Without giving out any spoilers, the Martians face a tragedy are must make choices between their lifestyle and dealing with One True for help. Barnes looks at how the libertarian world (Mars) and the socialist world (Earth) can interact and what price are the libertarians willing to pay to keep their way of life.

I recommend the book. It's a fast read and has plenty of neat technical ideas interspersed with the storyline.