Kaleidoscope Century is one of the most unpleasant books I’ve ever read, I can hardly believe I’ve read it again. All the same it’s a major work and very nearly a masterpiece. A man lives through the twenty-first century. Every fifteen years he gets ten years younger and forgets almost everything about the preceding fifteen years. He doesn’t know what he’s done, who he’s been, both his memories and the notes on his computer are fragmentary and contradictory. He wakes up this one time on Mars, with few possessions, but dragging an awful lot of baggage of the other kind. He isn’t a nice person, and he has done terrible things, for which he is intermittently and weirdly repentant. He thinks through what he can remember and dredge together of the century, then he goes looking for his old partner-in-crime. And then it gets weird.
This is the most unsuitable book for children in the history of the universe. I think it’s quite appropriate that there be books for grown ups, and this be one of them. It’s only odd in that it’s the sequel to Orbital Resonance, which is pretty much a YA.
It seems as if Barnes sat down in 1990 when writing Orbital Resonance and worked out in detail everything that happened from that day onwards for a hundred years, and then didn’t change anything in the future history even when time changed it. This means that when he wrote Kaleidoscope Century in 1995 it was already alternate history—never mind Heinlein’s 1957 giving us an out-of-date 1970 and 2000. This is weird, and while I don’t think it hurts Kaleidoscope Century much—there are possible reasons for it—it is a real problem for me once the series gets to The Sky So Big and Black. The details sound like real science fictional future history, but they are uniformly unpleasant—and far more unpleasant than anything that has actually happened in the 19 years since. This is a really detailed and well-thought out future, with a good understanding of the way changing tech changes possibilities, but it seems to have been thought out by someone who always looks on the black side and doesn’t have any faith in humanity. Having said that, horrible as Barnes’s century is, even when made deliberately worse by the characters, it can’t hold a candle to the twentieth century for real horror.
Barnes is always immensely readable. That’s a problem here, actually. Joshua Ali Quare is an unreliable narrator, he’s also a horrible person. There’s more rape and murder in this book than in everything else on the bookcase put together—and it’s rape and murder seen from the point of view of someone for whom they’re fun. Yet most of the time Quare is written to be kind of endearing, just getting along, but getting along includes a lot of making the world a worse place in big and small ways. He starts riots. He assassinates people. He rapes—or as he puts it “serbs”—women and girls. He’s a mercenary. And at other times he rescues a little street girl and brings her up as his daughter, works quietly as a rigger on a space elevator, or as a prospector on Mars. He justifies himself to himself and to his best friend and to the reader. He’s too much of a monster, or not enough of one. You spend a lot of time in his head when reading the book, and his head is a nasty place to be.
Now actual spoilers: the plot doesn’t quite work. Closed timelike curve me whatever handwaves you like, if you’re dead you stop going through. And I’m not sure the book needs it anyway, it would have been perfectly good with the 15 years and losing memory thing without the endless repetition. And if they have ships that can do that, can skip bits of it, then it doesn’t make emotional sense, and really in the end emotional sense is all you can hope for.
But despite making no sense, rape, murder, and a very unpleasant future, it’s still an excellently written and vastly ambitious book, with a scope both science fictional and literary. That’s what ultimately makes it a good book, though I do not like it. It has such a vast reach that it doesn’t actually matter that it exceeds its grasp, or that it seems to be Hell rather than Heaven that it’s reaching for.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
This was the second book of Barnes’s I picked up, as a direct consequence of having read his gloriously bonkers and ultimately big-hearted One for the Morning Glory.
I put it down in a big fat hurry, having concluded that I preferred the narrator’s room to his company to a degree best expressed in light-years, or light-months at the least. The third one I picked up appeared to be an utter cold bleakfest, and I haven’t looked at anything of his since.
To hear a review like this from you – knowing something of your tastes – makes me think maybe one day I’ll give this a second chance. It is now officially moved to my Jam Tomorrow pile from my Twelfth of Never stack. Thank you, I hope!
Gray: I’d generally suggest that you try A Million Open Doors or Orbital Resonance or The Duke of Uranium a long time before you try Kaleidoscope Century again.
My ambivalence about this book greets your ambivalence. I’ve read it twice now, and it left a slimy sensation in my head each time. And yet … there is reason in the madness. I think Barnes is writing in letters of fire a light-year high the aphorism “Evil consists in treating human beings as objects”, and further making the point that those who commit evil are nonetheless (and despite our abhorrence of the idea) human themselves. It’s not an easy idea to accept, and seeing it illustrated in the authorial equivalent of full color with surround sound is even harder.
It may have helped my acceptance of “Kaleidoscope Century” that I read “Mother of Storms” first. The latter contains some nasty violence, and (for me, at any rate) much too much detail about how experience-recording technology could be used by sexual sadist psychopaths. But again, the writing is strong, and the goals are ambitious. Whenever I read a Barnes book I remember the back cover blurb he wrote for William Barton’s “The Transmigration of Souls”: “People who think it’s dangerous to encounter a new idea, or an honest, open, strongly put exploration of an uncommon viewpoint, are going to be scared out of their fluffy-bunny minds by William Barton”. I think he was talking about himself as well.
I have to disagree with one statement in your post
Despite 9/11 and the Madrid bombing, North America and Western Europe have been peaceful compared to much of the world in those 19 years, which has given those of us who live there a sense of distance from the violence that has occurred elsewhere. It seems unlikely to me that a resident of Bosnia-Herzigovina, Rwanda, or Darfur would agree.
Barnes writes very well. Sometimes he writes places that one has no desire whatsoever to ever revisit (this one, Earth Made of Glass, several others), sometimes he writes places you love to return to (One for the Morning Glory). The trick with Barnes is that you don’t know which of them it will be till you’re halfway through the book.
I consider Kaleidoscope Century to be a mostly overlooked great sf novel. And I pretty much never recommend it to anyone because it’s so unpleasant.
(Apologies in advance, this comment is a little jumbled and incoherent because I slept poorly. Please forgive me any infelicitous choices of words.)
This is an extremely honest and precise review of an extremely difficult book.
As I think I said once on Making Light, this is one of the few books I’ve ever wished I could un-read after first reading it. Some particularly unsavory bits of the contents stuck with me in an almost PTSD-ish way, perhaps in part because they resonated disturbingly with some of my own disturbing content.
And yet it’s a brilliantly done book from a technical standpoint, and in achieving what I think Barnes was trying to.
One strong message or theme, I suggest, is the tremendous implicit value of civil society and of civilized nations, even with all that is wrong or undesirable about them. As Speaker To Managers implies, the book shows us all of Europe and North America in a similar state of chaos to that in Congo or Sierra Leone in the last couple decades, just with better technology. (The connection to Bosnia-Herzegovina is quite explicit, given that in the book “to serb” has become the verb for mass rape.)
One thing Barnes does very well is extrapolate consequences: given invention X, what happens? Springers in A Million Open Doors, the machine in Gaudeamus (which also has some priceless zings by his not-very-Tuckerized self as the main character, all sorts of stuff in Mother of Storms — there are many neat ideas and consequences.
Also, I don’t have a link for this, but I know somewhere online I saw John Barnes discussing how this book and a number of the others in this future history fit into a matrix of literary attributes, where he has been effectively enumerating all the possible combinations:
* Unreliable vs. reliable narrator;
* Good-guy protagonist vs. bad-guy protagonist;
* Utopia vs. dystopia;
etc.
(I might be remembering some of those dimensions wrong.)
Kaleidoscope Century is obviously bad guy protagonist x unreliable narrator x dystopia. I think The Sky So Big and Black fits in as unreliable narrator x good-guy protagonist, and I don’t remember whether its Mars is more of a utopia or dystopia.
John Barnes is weird, to me, in that he seems to deliberately eschew the idea that a series should be thematically consistent.
I mean, I read The Duke of Uranium, which is basically about young, hot, generally happy kids going to rescue the sweet, good-natured girlfriend of one of the kids. And it was basically cheerful swashbuckling in a hard-sci-fi universe. So, I liked that, and I went on to read A Princess of the Aerie, in which… well, I want to avoid spoilers, but it’s anything but basically cheerful swashbuckling.
There’s another tonal shift, not really quite as bad, but pretty noticeable, in his “souls” series. It’s like, dude, I appreciate that you’re a versatile writer, but generally when we read a sequel to a book, it’s because we kind of liked the experience of the first book.
Michael B Sullivan: I had the same experience with DoU except that I also gave it to my then 11 year old who loved it, and with PotA came out we argued about who was going to read it first. Fortunately, I won because, well, not so much the kinky enslaved sex as the mind control. Gah.