review of
John Barnes's Kaleidoscope Century
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 26-28, 2020

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1307730-john-barnes

Another new writer to me whose work I enjoyed. This one despite the anti-hero's being someone not even a mother cd love.

"I turn to the battered old werp case and open it up. Inside, the werp looks like it's seen better days; there's a prominent dent in the keyboard and the screen has two stains that won't wipe off with my bathrobe sleeve.

"The touch of my thumb on the security plate activates it. Must be mine. The screen clears. Words swim up:

"YOUR NAME IS JOSHUA ALI QUARE. HIT RETURN.

"I do.

"THIS IS YOUR WERP. MANY OF YOUR MEMORIES ARE IN HERE. PASSWORD CHECK: WHAT DID YOUR FATHER CALL YOUR MOTHER THE VERY LAST TIME YOU SAW HIM?

"The question startles me. I speak the answer aloud, "A Commie cunt." I reach to type it in but apparently the werp has voice processing because it's already responding.

"When did werps get voice processing? And when did werps come along, anyway? When I was younger there were only laptops, and I sure couldn't afford one." - p 11

Not to be picky or anything, but do you think the author gave sufficient thought to whether "Commie cunt" might've been more appropriately capitalized "commie Cunt" or "commie cunt" or "Commie Cunt" or even "COMMIE CUNT"? I mean I think a case cd be made for all of those possibilities. Personally, I'm a bit inclined to "cOmmie cUnt" but maybe that's a bit too graphic.

"YOU ARE ON MARS. THE YEAR IS 2109 AND YOU NO LONGER WORK FOR THE KGB, MURPHY'S COMSAT AVENGERS, NIHON AMERICA, OR THE ORGANIZATION. THERE IS NO MORE SOVIET UNION, NO MORE FREE SOVIET ASSOCIATION, NO MORE EUROPEAN COMMONWEALTH, AND NO MORE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. EARTH IS COMPLETELY CONTROLLED BY RESUNA, YOU ARE PHYSICALLY JUST OVER SIXTY YEARS OLD. YOU HAVE ONLY FRAGMENTARY MEMORIES OF YOUR FORMER LIFE AS JAMES NORREN, NOR DO YOU RECALL MUCH OF YOUR FORMER LIVES AS JASON TESTOR, BRANDON SMITH, ULYSSES GRANT, FRED ENGELS, EURIPEDES FREDERICKSON, ELISHA TESTOR, OR KINDNESS O'HART. A NEW IDENTITY HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED FOR YOU AS "REAGAN FOSTER HINCKLEY," A JOKE WHICH YOU AND MAYBE A DOZEN HISTORIANS WILL GET." - p 12

But you get it, right? Right? & you're not an historian, right? John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan ostensibly to impress actress Jodie Foster. Reagan died but it didn't matter because they had a clone waiting to replace him with. Even Nancy cdn't tell the difference. Maybe it was b/c Hinckley's parents were major Republican donors, maybe it was because it's always good PR to classify assassins of presidents as insane but Hinckley ended up in St Elizabeth's Hospital, the same place where Ezra Pound was put instead of being executed as a traitor. Some people have all the luck. I don't think Hinckley got lucky w/ Foster, though.

"Hinckley's mental problems did not magically disappear after being committed to St. Elizabeth's. He attempted suicide at least three times after his arrest, and his obsession with Jodie Foster continued. From St. Elizabeth's, Hinckley wrote a letter to Time magazine professing his feelings for Jodie: "The most important thing in my life is Jodie Foster's love and admiration. If I can't have them, neither can anyone else. We are a historical couple, like Napoleon and Josephine, and a romantic couple like Romeo and Juliet."" - https://www.famous-trials.com/johnhinckley/538-athospital

Just imagine if it worked: Let's say that you have a thing for a celebrity, let's say you're a hetero guy & you'd like to get w/ a woman actress whose talents you're impressed by, or whatever. Let's say you're in France & you're really fucking tired of Macron, or whatever his name is, so you kill him &, presto chango!, the next thing you know you're shacking up w/ sd actress. Now imagine that it worked perfectly every time, it sets a trend, that might really shake up the world a bit.

"I look around and see that the gadget that I thought was a microwave is a "Westinghouse Foodzup! Reconstitutor." Taking a wild guess, I toss a square labelled "tomato soup" and another labelled "Four grilled cheese sandwichs" into it—it looks like a microwave inside, but who can tell?—carefully putting "tomato soup" into a large bowl first.

"The readout on the reconstitutor says "select finished or prep for manual." I have no idea so I select "finished" and push the button.

"It hums for about two minutes, then chimes. I open the door. In the large bowl I had put the square package of "tomato soup" in, there's a small covered bowl, and it's full of hot tomato soup. A stack of four grilled cheese sandwiches sits on a plate in there with that package. And there's no sign of the wrappers from the food packages." - p 13

That's not really fair, is it? I mean the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is gone but a Westinghouse appliance still works? Cdn't they at least revive Nicola Tesla & pay him the money Westinghouse owed him? W/ interest? That wd be fair. Still, I want one of those Foodzup! Reconstitutors except I'll just betcha they leak all sorts of harmful radiation that makes you sterile or a Manchurian Candidate or something. Imagine combining it w/ coffee?!

"The text reads: "The use of coffee is associated with bowel cancer, genetic damage, and several disorders of the nervous system. If you are a proven frequent and/or irresponsible coffee user you can be denied health benefits under the Uniform Care Act of 2094."" - p 14

That's apparently why my uncleaned coffee-stained uniform was a fetish object for that nurse I usta date. It might make more sense to you if you knew that she liked douching w/ a certain Pittsburgh beer. I cdn't even drink the stuff under those conditions.

"The text documents don't reveal much. I wasn't much of a writer. When I do write it's mostly things like shopping lists. From these I learn I like Iron City beer." - p 15

Of course, I'm curious about this guy, just as he is about himself — but when we finally start learning the details!: What a shit! But it's when the concept of memes as AIs that fight w/ each other using human agents for control of the world that I start to get really interested.

""Meme. Noun, Obsolete meaning coined originally by Richard Dawkins, twentieth century, by analogy to 'gene,' to mean fundamental communicable ideas, such as melodies, pottery patterns, literary forms, taboos, fashions, superstitions, customs, et cetera.["]"

[..]

""Meme. Noun. Any of several thousand very large self-replicating artificial intelligences["]" - p 35

[..]

"The War of the Memes was down to about twenty-five competing memes worldwide, and just over half the world population was carrying some dominant meme—some program running in their heads had replaced whatever personality grew there naturally." - pp 35-36

Some anti-vaccination people, who I'm sympathetic to, might claim that the purpose of the current drive to vaccinate everyone in the world is more of an attempt to genetically modify everyone in a way akin to what's described above.

As it's gradually revealed, the protagonist is a particularly violent & brutal mercenary who's selling his services to a meme to wipe out & terrorize the meme's human opposition.

"The face that popped up on the vid was the first surprise: One True, for some strange reason, had decided to look like Dan Rather, or like Harrison Ford—then I realized it was probably an intermediate morph of the two. Kind of like everyone wanted an American president to look like back when there had been American presidents. Lots of signs of having lived and thought and felt, none of which it had done really, if you were a hardcore humanist, which is what I was trying to be while I talked to the thing." - p 42

Because I feel like we're living in extraordinary times when an oligarchy is taking its most extreme steps ever to try to bring the general human populace under control I've been tending to find & to highlight related themes in the books I've been reading. It's not hard to do in SciFi. I posted what I call "text panels" (museum-speak, I worked for museums), what other people call "memes", on social media attacking the propaganda of this oligarchy for 5 months & then froze my account because I'd had enough strife struggling against GROUPTHINK & wanted to move on to other things in my life. (This was all part of the process that produced my latest book, Unconscious Suffocation - A Personal Journey through the PANDEMIC PANIC, readily available for sale online - credited to "Amir-ul Kafirs"). The following text was one I excerpted from & made into such a panel:

"The old guy went on. "Well, I can understand why alot of people choose to run a meme, to invite it into their existence. Really, I do; there are plenty of people out there whose own personalities will never allow them any happiness, who tie themselves in one knot after another, people for whom the biggest curse in the world is freedom of choice because they're programmed to keep choosing wrong and blaming themselves for it. There's no meme out there that's as cruel to the people running it as their own personalities would be. They should have the choice to pick up one, even though it's the last choice they can ever make.

""But you and I—or you and this Yuri, if that's really his name, and Monica, and me, probably your Murphy is he's still alive, all of us—for some reason we're fussy. We want to make those choices. The thought of not making them makes us even more unhappy than our own failures. We can't help it, we only want happiness we can get for ourselves, as ourselves, by our own efforts and choices.["]" - pp 48-49

I mentioned the main character's nasty past. The following's not even as nasty as it gets. I didn't want to share those parts with you.

"I'd had a straight strong-arm to put on some politician, way out in the sticks around Spokane Dome, a guy named Bizet who was into good government and no corruption and like that, and who needed it explained to him that he could run his own territory as clean as he wanted it but Spokane was going to have prostitution because that was ours. He was one of the those progressive good boys that can't believe that you can do it; he had called the cops, found out who they really worked for when they wouldn't come out. I beat him pretty good" - p 81

The character, & his fellow mercenaries, has a way of prolonging his life & escaping consequences by going into a sortof time loop suspended animation & ending up at a future where he has little or no memory & where he has to restart, as at the beginning of the book.

"within the time loop, you could move on the forward leg of the loop toward the future" - p 64

In his newest incarnation, the main character is turned off by discovering who he was.

"I shudder. I'm not sure I want to live that way again, do those things again. It's turning my stomach to remember a lot of it." - p 66

There's some cynicism about drs that I don't remember at all but I might as well throw it in, eh?

"["]they stay there for year after year, getting free tuition and advanced training. Then when it's time for them to start paying back the benefits they received, to be a doctor or engineer for the people who paid to train them, they skip over to the West because the salaries are higher here. The year before they built the Wall, the German Democratic Republic lost practically the whole graduating class of every medical school. Don't tell me doctors have some special love for freedom. We know what doctors love, and it ain't that. But what they do love—and I mean money—oh, there's plenty of that over here. That's what they come for. Because they want to make cash, not make people well."" - p 68

Keep that in mind when you think of the 'frontline hero' DOCTOR GODS during COVID-19(84).

""There's one other thing," he said, and pulled out something that looked like a ray gun from a cheap sci-fi movie. He saw how startled I looked. I think he smiled. "It's an air-injector," he said. "You're getting a vaccination. Give me your arm."

[..]

"I didn't give him a fight, not even an argument. I wonder about that. If I had, would he have said, "Fine, die of mutAIDS?" Probably not, since CDC had not named mutAIDS yet" - p 75

"For the rest of it, there's the history books. First reports of a rapidly acting, airborne mutant HIV, December 1993. Riots and panics all over. South Central LA blew up. Then on January 28, 1994, President Bush was found dead in bed. He had been ill for about three weeks before, and probably contagious since July." - p 78

Given that this bk was published in 1998, President Bush's death from an STD might've been wishful thinking on the author's part. Ah.. if only.. Given today's emphasis on pandemic & vaccination, this bk's plot that involved people being given a vaccine before the human-made pandemic began might spark ye olde imagination, eh?!

But enough about Earth, what about terraforming on Mars? What about marsforming on Earth?

"Finally it flies away. I check via werp. Yes, Marsform is a word, has been for a long time. Yes, Moonforms are now developing and the first ones beginning to spread out over the face of Luna, where the first rains have already fallen for a decade or so. The moon is the colonies' major base against Resuna. Yes, Resuna's Earth." - p 84

Ah.. the memories!

"He slid an envelope into my pocket. I waited half an hour, got on the first train that seemed to be headed somewhere, hoped a rocket wouldn't hit it for a while, and then went into the bathroom. The first bathroom I picked held a dead conductor. Close that door, walk further down. Next one was unoccupied. I put a newspaper down on the seat, sat down on it, and opened the note the guy had given me.

"A short note like all of them: a British regiment in Amsterdam was showing signs of effectiveness. Go there and kill any two men I thought would do maximum damage." - p 101

I continue to find the human tendency to create maximum mayhem to be repulsive. Does that make me old-fashioned? It doesn't make me an old-fashioned. I know that much.

""The worms?" I asked.

""Eating through dikes and destroying levees, far upstream. They're having to spray poison but the worms don't die easy.["]" - p 112

Ecowarfare, of course.

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1307730-john-barnes ( )

I liked the premise of this book based on the blurb on the back cover but despite a couple of tries I just haven't been able to read it. It's too violent and too soulless. I think that's the point, but if so it was made too well as it made it unlikeable to the point of undreadable to me. ( )