Resurrected Review: The Armies of Memory, by John Barnes

Here's something I wrote back in 2006 about the concluding novel in John Barnes' Thousand Cultures series. Barnes' work has never, it seems to me, got quite the attention it deserves -- he's a fascinating pure science fiction writer, and some of his stories are among my favorites of the past few decades. Alas, he has fallen somewhat silent of late: no novels since 2012, no short fiction since 2019.

Review: The Armies of Memory, by John Barnes

by Rich Horton

In The Armies of Memory John Barnes concludes his Thousand Cultures series that began with a lovely novelette, "Canso de Fis de Jovent", in Analog in 1991. This story, which tells of the experience of a group of friends including the narrator, Giraut Leones, when their world, Wilson, and their culture, Nou Occitan, a synthetic recreation of Occitan, an historical area of France (in the Provence, and associated with the Cathars) at the time of the troubadors, is perturbed by the arrival of Springer technology: instantaneous jump gates, that serve to relink the "Thousand Cultures" that Earth has planted on a number of worlds. The other key technologies are powerful Artificial Intelligence (restricted in human space by Human Supremacy laws) and a means of reincarnation by installing recorded brain states ("pyspyxes") into cloned bodies. That story became the first section of A Million Open Doors, which was followed by Earth Made of Glass and The Merchants of Souls. In these novels Giraut became an agent for humanity's OSP, which tries to keep the various cultures from becoming overly oppressive and from bothering their neighbour cultures. He married a woman named Margaret, then underwent a painful divorce. He discovered remains of mysteriously vanished aliens, the Predecessors. He was present at the founding of a new religion, Ixism, and simultaneously at the mutual destruction of two cultures. And he dealt with the crisis on Earth, where a majority of the population has chosen to "go into the box": permanent VR life.

As this novel opens, Margaret is now Giraut's boss, and Giraut is the head of a small team of agents including his new lover, his reincarnated 8-year old (physically) father and his reincarnated friend, Raimbault, from his youth back on Wilson. Giraut is also a spectacularly successful musician, playing Nou Occitan trobador-tradition music. Now he is premiering a new song cycle based on the life and beliefs of Ix, the founder of an important new religion. But this has made him a target, perhaps of Occitan traditionalists, or perhaps of enemies of Ixism -- or who knows?: at any rate, he is the subject of repeated assassination attempts. After a while it becomes clear that the assassination attempts are a curious mixture of brilliance and incompetence. And finally, more scarily, that they are being carried out by force grown clone bodies implanted with "chimera" brains: that is, the combination of two or more recorded human brains, an obscenity in Council culture.

All signs lead to planets of the "Union", a little-understood group of illegally colonized planets outside of Council space, in particular Aurenga, the planet colonized by the "Lost Legion", a group of Nou Occitan war criminals. This is interesting because there are indications that the lost psypyx of Margaret's predecessor Shan is also there. What's more, they learn that not only are human "chimeras" involved, but some chimera's might have AI components.

The novel quite intriguingly spirals from an important but smallish mystery to bigger and more important mysteries. Eventually it is in great part about the meaning of intelligence, and of humanity, and the place and rights of AIs. And this is in the context of extremely scary revelations about the fate of the Predecessors, and a threat of alien invasion. Barnes treats these issues very intelligently, and the novel is always interesting: full of action, full of neat science-fictional ideas that have interesting philosophical ramifications, and full of fine and engaging characters. A weakness is that the closing sections seem rushed, and are full of long (and still fairly interesting) passages in which we and the main characters are baldly told the situation, rather than having the situation organically revealed. And the unwinding of things towards the end has an air of patness, convenience, about it, even as it leads to a dramatic setpiece of a series conclusion. But even with this shortcoming, this remains one of the must-read SF novels of 2006.