BARNES, John (Allen)

(1957-)

   US writer who began publishing sf with "Finalities Besides the Grave" for AMZ in 1985, and who made some impact on the field with his first novel, The Man who Pulled Down the Sky (1987), an effective drama involving highly coloured political conflicts throughout the Solar System. His second, Sin of Origin (1988), rather more ambitiously attempts to combine SPACE OPERA, RELIGION and SOCIOLOGY in a tale set on a planet (which humans call Randall) whose species enjoyed an extremely complex tripartite form of symbiosis before the arrival of two human sects - Christians and communists - who variously, and fatally, come to "understand" what is happening. As the tripartite symbiosis breaks down, the surviving singles begin to replicate human forms of behaviour - slavery becomes rife - and the novel continues to darken. The final conclusion is that DNA, found in all sentient species, reproduces by causing its bearers to destroy themselves and their planets violently in terminal HOLOCAUSTS, so that DNA spores are blown to new stars. JB's third novel, Orbital Resonance (1991), a juvenile, rather implausibly at times - though showing a marked increase in panache and vigour over the first books - shows adult humans deciding that their children are better equipped to handle the challenges of the new in space. The young female protagonist evinces clear similarities to the heroine of Robert A. HEINLEIN's Podkayne of Mars (1963). A MILLION OPEN DOORS (1992) also hearkens deliberately backwards to the exuberant, human-dominated, outward-looking galaxy of writers like Heinlein, though the story itself - a young man comes of age on a strange planet - is perhaps more shadowed by self-awareness than some of its predecessors. And in Mother of Storms (1994), which is his most impressive novel, JB creates a powerful and complex portrait of a NEAR FUTURE world wracked by the eponymous self-fueling storm, and on the verge of numerous cusps, ethical and practical. Through VIRTUAL REALITY, SEX has become extraordinarily present in everyone's consciousness, and GENETIC ENGINEERING helps point the way to the stars. Meanwhile the storm continues, in a narrative which makes profitable use of both the bestseller disaster mode and of CYBERPUNK. JB has become a virtuoso manipulator of sf themes; and the nature of his next book is impossible to predict from the shape of its predecessor. Other works: How to Build a Future (1991 chap), nonfiction; the Time Raider sequence, featuring a Vietnam War veteran transported back to previous battles: Time Raider \#1: Wartide (1992); \#2 Battlecry (1992) and \#3 Union Fires (1992).