Earth Made of Glass

A sequel to A Million Open Doors, which I did not like much, also set in Barnes’s Thousand Cultures universe and featuring the same characters, Girault and Margaret Leones. Earth Made of Glass was shortlisted for the Clarke Award in 1999.

This second Thousand Cultures novel is, I think, a better book - at least, I liked it slightly more - but not for the right reasons. Like the novel preceding it, the story could easily take place in the present-day. It doesn’t need to be science fiction. In A Million Open Doors it was toxic masculine society versus repressed puritanical society. Here, it’s racist society versus enclosed society. In the first novel, the two cultures were invented, openly so, but invented based on a set of show more principles. In Earth Made of Glass, the two cultures, which share the limited habitable area of the world of Briand, are appropriated. The Tamil Mandalam are an attempt to create the culture of southern India in the first few centuries CE, specifically that which generated the Cankam, a huge body of epic poetry often considered to be the historical highlight of Tamil literary culture. The Maya of Kintulum, on the other hand, are a best-guess at how the Maya actually lived. None of those involved in setting up the two cultures had any connection, cultural, racial or geographic, to them.

By the time the springer arrives at Briand, the Tamil and the Maya hate each other, and consider each other to be less than human. A past disaster has resulted in a Maya shanty town outside the Tamil capital of Tajavur. Ethnic violence is commonplace. The main Maya city of Yaxkintulum is completely off-limits to the Tamil. Girault and Margaret are sent in undercover to find some way to stop the ethnic violence and bring both cultures peacefully into the Council of Humanity fold.

Barnes does a good job of describing Tanjavur and its cultures, but the endless racism towards the Maya gets tiresome very quickly. (As does the joke about people trying to pronounce Girault correctly.) And when the action shifts to Yaxkintulum, it proves just as fascinating a place (and, ironically, the Maya relied heavily on AI to invent the stories and myths which are carved into every available surface in the city). The Maya want to improve relations, and embark on a risky plan. They send a Mayan prophet to Tanjavur, with a message to not let their lives be defined by their literary corpus or mythology. Things began to look up, but then rapidly go downhill.

The two cultures are fascinating, but it feels like a guilty pleasure. Occitan and Caledony in A Million Open Doors were entirely invented; Tamil Mandalam and the Maya are not. They’re very deliberately skewed takes on real cultures. It feels like misuse, or perhaps even abuse, even though they make for a more interesting read than the dull Occitan and Caledon cultures. There is also a major female player in the plot - she’s not a character because Barnes’s characterisation of her is basically “slut”, but she has more impact on the story than anyone else. Every mention of her leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Even more so, when the narrative seems to expect the reader to admire the most racist of the Tamils.

There were two more novels after Earth Made of Glass, The Merchants of Souls in 2001 and The Armies of Memory in 2006. There’s mention in both A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass of an alien race whose artefacts have been discovered in numerous places, and that sort of makes me want to read the rest of the quartet, even though I may find lots in them I don’t like… show less

This is in large part a novel about hermeneutics, although the word is never used: how do you read a sacred text, how interpretation depends on all kinds of context (immediate, global, canonical, sociocultural), and -- most interesting -- how it is possible for a community to profoundly reinterpret its sacred texts in a way that moves from violence to peace, from a literal to a spiritual reading. The community, in this case, is an artificially recreated Mayan community; there's a similarly artificial Tamil community, but the themes are stronger in the case of the Mayans.

Oh, there's a plot, too, and it's a pretty good one (except for the cluelessness of the main character who is completely oblivious that his wife is having an affair, show more even though it is constantly telegraphed by everyone around him). But the real draw for me is the religious theme, and the beauty with which both cultures are portrayed.

In addition to hermeneutics, we see a prophet being made; discerning his message; spreading his message; learning to live according to his message; and being rejected, not so much by his community, but by one man who cannot get past his personal hurt and so condemns the whole world to annihilation. Good stuff. show less

This is the sequel to A Million Open Doors, which was my introduction to Barnes. It's twelve years later, Giraut and Margaret are agents of the Office of Special Projects of the Council of Humanity, they're feeling middle-aged, and they've just had their vacation cut short for a new assignment to a really unpleasant planet. On Briand, two cultures that were artificial literary recreations and not overly tolerant of alternative viewpoints to begin with have been forced by inconvenient natural phenomena to live rather closer together than was envisioned when these two cultures were sold this very last of the partially-terraformable worlds at the end of the colonization period. And then things start to go wrong for Giraut, Margaret, and show more everyone else.

This is not a happy book, but it is consistently interesting. I should perhaps mention, for those who were put off by the violence of Mother of Storms and Kaleidescope that it has very little of that kind of graphic violence. show less

A very quick read. I wish I hadn't noticed the comparisons to Heinlein on the dust jacket, because it was very hard afterwards to not think Stranger in a Strange Land as I was reading this. A shame, since Barnes does a much better job with some of the same material. Overall: solid, thought-provoking hard SF. Interesting treatment of the messianic themes that entirely avoids Heinlein's obnoxious forays into omniscience. There's no side trip to Heaven here to cheat the essential question of doubt. There's plenty of other material here as well. The personal relationships between the main characters are often painfully true to life, though Barnes seems to have a heavy hand at times. There's some interesting musing on why humans keep going show more in a world where their efforts aren't actually necessary to survive that hits close to home for me, after all of these months of unemployment, but it isn't as keenly focused as in an Iain M. Banks. A good book, but not really much new ground broken. show less

A worthy successor to A Million Open Doors. The depth of the cultures is just as believable and stunning as the first book. The story was sad but in ways that were totally expected. Read this!

John Barnes is definitely a person I'd like to have drinks with. He's been one of my favorite authors since I read Orbital Resonance when I was 15 and couldn't believe that an old white guy understand what it was like to be a teenage girl. (Still don't know how he did it.)

Better than the stuff he's been churning out lately it's still very dated and one imagines that Tom is wistful for the good old days of the old war. These Islamic terrorists must have him totality befuddled. Nonetheless a rattling good yarn for the airport or the beach.