John Barnes Books In Order

Century Next Door Books In Order

  1. Orbital Resonance (1991)
  2. Kaleidoscope Century (1995)
  3. Candle (2000)
  4. The Sky So Big and Black (2002)

Timeraider Books In Order

  1. Wartide (1992)
  2. Battlecry (1992)
  3. Union Fires (1992)

Million Open Doors Books In Order

  1. A Million Open Doors (1992)
  2. Earth Made of Glass (1998)
  3. The Merchants of Souls (2001)
  4. The Armies of Memory (2006)

Timeline Wars Books In Order

  1. Patton’s Spaceship (1996)
  2. Washington’s Dirigible (1997)
  3. Caesar’s Bicycle (1997)

Jak Jinnaka Books In Order

  1. The Duke of Uranium (2002)
  2. A Princess of the Aerie (2003)
  3. In the Hall of the Martian King (2003)

Daybreak Books In Order

  1. Directive 51 (2010)
  2. Daybreak Zero (2011)
  3. The Last President (2013)

Novels

  1. The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky (1986)
  2. Sin of Origin (1988)
  3. Mother of Storms (1994)
  4. One for the Morning Glory (1996)
  5. Encounter with Tiber (1996)
  6. Payback City (1998)
  7. Finity (1999)
  8. The Return (2000)
  9. Gaudeamus (2004)
  10. Tales of the Madman Underground (2009)
  11. Losers in Space (2012)
  12. Raise the Gipper! (2012)

Collections

  1. Apostrophes and Apocalypses (1998)

Century Next Door Book Covers

Timeraider Book Covers

Million Open Doors Book Covers

Timeline Wars Book Covers

Jak Jinnaka Book Covers

Daybreak Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

John Barnes Books Overview

Orbital Resonance

For the last thirty years, the survivors of the collapse has tried to exist Earthside. Space colonies like the Flying Duthman offer the last and best hope for the mother planet’s future; the adolescents on board the Dutchman really are humanity’s last hope, but knowing is a heavy burden especially for Mel who has plans of her own.

Kaleidoscope Century

Joshua Ali Quare wakes in 2019 at the age of 140 in a strong youthful body with no memory of his past, to find he is at the center of a vast and deadly conspiracy. The only clues to his identity are the records he has left messages from the man he once was…
As Quare journeys through his past, he discovers he has been a key figure in the history of a turbulent, violent century soldier, criminal, assassin, spy. A century filled with killing plagues and warring cults, ruthless corporations and dying nations. A century where treachery is often the only way to survive. Now someone is looking for him. Someone from his past. And Quare must learn the terrifying secret of his history before it unleashed devastating consequences for the future of the human race.

Candle

Currie Culver is about fifty five years old, in good health, living in a comfortable retirement in the Rockies with his wife. In the wake of the Meme Wars that swept the planet two generations before, Currie, his wife, and almost everyone on Earth have in their minds a copy of One True, software that grants its hosts limited telepathy and instills a kind of general cooperation. In his younger days, Currie hunted ‘comboys’ people who had unplugged from the global net in order to evade One True, and who hid in wilderness areas, surviving by raiding the outposts of civilization. Now Currie is called back into service to capture the last comboy still at large, a man who calls himself Lobo. With his high tech equipment, thoroughly plugged into the global net, Currie sets out to bring Lobo in. Instead, Lobo captures Currie, and manages to deprogram him. Thrown back on the resources of his own intelligence, courage, and wisdom for the first time in twenty five years, Currie finds himself in a battle of minds with his captor…
with results that will change the lives of everyone on Earth. In the best tradition of John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein, Candle is a novel about individualism and society that will leave readers breathless, arguing, and demanding more.

The Sky So Big and Black

At the end of the twenty first century, Earth is under the control of a single intelligence, the apparently benign One True. Mars, meanwhile, is slowly terraforming, and the human settlers there are still free of One True’s control…
but they need a pressure suits to survive outside, and it will be a century or more before the planet’s fit for terrestrial life. Terpsichore Murray is growing up on Mars. She wants to quit school and become, like her father, an ecoprospector. He has other ideas: he wants her to stay in school. He does want her along on his next long trip but only to conduct a group of younger kids from the highlands at Mars’s equator back to school in Wells City. What happens next will change Terpsichore, will change Mars, and will open the door to a new chapter in the history of intelligent beings in the solar system…
all of them.

A Million Open Doors

Nou Occitan is a place where duels are fought with equal passion over insults and artistic views alike. Giraut swordsman, troubador, lover is a creature of this swashbuckling world, the most isolated of humanity’s Thousand Cultures. But the winds of change have come to Nou Occitan. As the invention of the ‘springer’ instantaneous interstellar travel, at a price spreads throughout the human galaxy, the stability and purity of no world, no matter how isolated, is safe. Nor can Giraut’s life remain untouched. To his wonder, his is about to find himself made an ambassador to a different human world, a place strange beyond his wildest imaginings.

Earth Made of Glass

Welcome to the Thousand Cultures in which humanity’s hundreds of settled worlds are finally coming back together, via the recently invented technology of instantaneous travel. And in which Giraut and Margaret work as professional diplomats, helping to finesse the stresses and strains of so much abrupt new contact among wildly diverse cultures. Now, however, their task is to bring in the terrifyingly hostile world of Briand, a planet of broiling acid oceans whose only habitable portions are Greenland sized subcontinents that project out of the abyssal heat of the planetary surface into it stratosphere. But Briand’s physical hostility is nothing compared to the venom its two human cultures bear toward one another. Into this terrible world come Giraut and Margaret to try to do the right thing by the Cultures, by the inhabitants of Braind, and by one another.

The Merchants of Souls

The sequel to A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of GlassSpecial agent Giraut Leones, betrayed by his superior and closest friend, swore he would never work for the Office of Special Projects again but now he must. A new movement on Earth seeks to use the recorded personalities of the dead as helpless virtual reality playthings, and to the worlds of the Thousand Cultures where the reborn are accepted as normal citizens it’s a monstrous crime. If Giraut cannot stop Earth from ratifying its plans, the tenuous structure of interstellar human civilization will collapse. Complicating matters, Giraut’s brain now hosts a second consciousness the revived mind of his long dead friend Raimbaut. Together, Giraut and Raimbaut must confront their shared past while struggling with a deadly present.

The Armies of Memory

Giraut Leones, special agent for the human Thousand Cultures’ shadowy Office of Special Plans, is turning fifty and someone is trying to kill him. Giraut’s had a long career; the number of entities that might want him dead is effectively limitless. But recently Giraut was approached by the Lost Legion, an Occitan underground linked to an alliance of illegally human settled worlds beyond the frontier. Also, it turns out that the Lost Legion colony has a ‘psypyx’ a consciousness recording of Shan, onetime boss of the Office of Special Plans. If they have that, they have literally thousands of devastating secrets. Now, returning to his native Nou Occitan, Giraut will encounter violence and treachery from human and artificial consciousnesses alike. As bigotry and mob violence erupt throughout the rapidly destabilizing interstellar situation, Giraut will be called on the make the ultimate sacrifice, for the sake of civilization itself

The Duke of Uranium

Living on a 36th century space station, 18 year old Jak Jinnaka’s seemingly normal life turns when strangers viciously attack him and kidnap his girlfriend, Sesh. When Jak learns Sesh is actually a princess from a distant world, and that he has been groomed from birth to be a secret agent, he sets out to free Sesh from her captor, the mysterious Duke of Uranium and discovers a world he never knew existed.

Directive 51

It is known as National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51. Signed in 2007, it claims specific Federal powers in the event of a catastrophic emergency Heather O Grainne is the assistant secretary in the Office of Future Threat Assessment, investigating rumors surrounding something called Daybreak. Part philosophic discussion, part international terrorist faction, and part artists movement, it’s a group of diverse people with radical ideas who have only one thing in common their hatred for the Big System and their desire to take it down. Until Heather can determine whether these people are all talk and no action, she wants to keep this information from going public. But Daybreak is about to become a lot less secret. Seemingly random events in a recycling facility in Wyoming, on an island off the coast of California, and in Jayapura, Indonesia where the plane carrying the Vice President has suddenly vanished are in fact connected as part of a plan to destroy modern civilization. America is at the dawn of a new primitive age an age that will eliminate the country s top government personnel, leaving the nation no choice but to implement its emergency contingency program: Directive 51.

Daybreak Zero

What began as a technothriller continues as high adventure in the newly savage ruins of civilization.

In late 2024, Daybreak, a movement of post-apocalyptic eco-saboteurs, smashed modern civilization to its knees. In the losing, hopeless struggle against Daybreak, Heather O’Grainne played a major role. That story was told in Directive 51.

Now Heather’s story continues in Daybreak Zero. In the summer of 2025, she leads a tiny organization of scientists, spies, scouts, entrepreneurs, engineers, dreamers, and daredevils based in Pueblo, Colorado. Both of the almost-warring governments of the United States have charged them with an all but impossible mission: find a way to put the world back together.

But Daybreak’s triumph has flung the world back centuries in technology, politics, and culture. Pro-Daybreak Tribals openly celebrate ending the world as we know it. Army regiments have to fight their way in and out of Pennsylvania. The Earth’s environment is saturated with plastic-devouring biotes and electronics-corroding nanoswarm. A leftover Daybreak device drops atom bombs from the moon on any outpost of the old civilization it can spot.

Confined to her base in Pueblo to give birth to her first child, Heather recruits and monitors a coterie of tech wizards, tough guys, and modern-day frontier scouts: a handful of heroes to patrol a continent.

All the news is bad: Tribals have overrun Indiana and Illinois; the last working aircraft carrier sits helplessly out in the Indian Ocean, not daring to come closer to land; the crash of one of the last working airplanes kills a vital industrialist; Tribals try to force appeaseme*nt on the Provi government while the Temper government faces a rebellion of religious fanatics; seventeen states are lost to the Tribals as California drifts into secession andhereditary monarchy, and everywhere, Provis and Tempers lurch toward civil war.

Heather’s agents have exceptional courage, initiative, skill, intelligence, and daring, but can they be enough? For the sake of everything from her newborn son to her dying nation, can she forge them into a the weapon that can at last win the world back from the overwhelming, malevolent force of Daybreak? Her success or failure may change everything for the next thousand years, beginning from Daybreak Zero.

Mother of Storms

In the middle of the Pacific, a gigantic hurricane accidentally triggered by nuclear explosions spawns dozens more in its wake.A world linked by a virtual reality network experiences the devastation first hand, witnessing the death of civilization as we know it and the violent birth of an emerging global consciousness. Vast in scope, yet intimate in personal detail, Mother of Storms is a visionary fusion of cutting edge cyberspace fiction and heart stopping storytelling in the grand tradition, filled with passion, tragedy, and the triumph of the human spirit.

One for the Morning Glory

Shortly after little Prince Amatus secretly sips the Wine of the Gods, leaving him without the left side of his body, four mysterious Companions appear to help the prince with the curious curse and to guide him along a perilous quest to manhood. PW.

Encounter with Tiber

The second man to walk on the moon teams up with a Hugo Award finalist to chronicle the story of an astronaut who discovers evidence of an extinct race of aliens that left traces of their civilization on the moon.

Finity

Lyle Peripart’s world is coming apart. Up until just a few days ago he was a settled professor at the University of Auckland. The descendant of American expatriates, he’s proud of his ancestry and privately doesn’t care for the Reichs that have dominated the world since the Axis victory over a century ago. But he’s the quiet type, not looking for a fight. Then Lyle is recruited for private industry by the mysterious industrialist Geoffrey Iphwin and that’s when everything stops making sense. His fiancee turns out to be a gun toting weapons expert who saves him from assassination and who, immediately afterwards, remembers nothing of what she did. But what she does remember is that she grew up in a world with an entirely different history, in which America surrendered to the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Even stranger, several of their friends turn out to have each grown up in worlds with different histories still. Worse, they gradually realize that not one of them has ever talked to anyone inside the continental United States. In fact, just thinking about the United States is hard as if something is trying to stop them.

The Return

On July 20, 1969, Buzz Aldrin, along with crewmate Neil Armstrong, made history as they placed humankind’s first steps on the moon. Now, in The Return, written by award winning novelist John Barnes, Aldrin offers a compelling novel about the opportunities and dangers that confront us today and shows why we must, and will, seize the challenges before us. When a tragic Shuttle accident kills a world famous basketball player on his trip into space, a trip that had been planned as a PR coup for the space program, former astronaut Scott Blackstone is out of a job. Worse, he and his ‘Citizen Observer’ program are vilified in the media, and he’s being sued for a billion dollars. His older brother, Nick, research chief for a major aerospace firm, persuades Scott’s estranged ex wife, Thalia a top ranked attorney to take on Scott’s defense. Gradually, it begins to appear that the ‘accident’ might not have been an accident at all. Meanwhile, as long feared, India and Pakistan go to war and, worse, Pakistan deploys a nuclear device high in the upper atmosphere, putting the crew of the orbiting International Space Station in iminent danger of destruction by radiation exposure. While the world’s space vehicles are grounded by the radiation storm set off by the detonation, only a few weeks remain to rescue the crew, and there’s no known way to do it. Save, perhaps, for a secret project of Nick’s…
The Return is a story of outsized characters, global crises, and big, daring ideas…
and as told by Buzz Aldrin it carries a ring of truth. He’s been there. He’s done that. And he’s already helped change the world.

Gaudeamus

Shatter the line between fiction and fantasy…
The life of an award winning novelist probably bears more resemblance to ‘normal’ than most fans would want to believe. But every once in awhile, strange things are bound to erupt around those most equipped to document them…
so imagine what renowned science fiction writer John Barnes might do when he finds himself in one of the wildest, most rollicking hard SF adventures to hit print in years. Barnes’ college friend Travis Bismark always brought back plenty of great stories from his job as an industrial spy. This time, over a few beer and coffee fueled chat sessions, Travis unravels a tale about his current case too tall for even an SF author to believe: a Gaudeamus machine that bends physics in order to make possible both teleportation and time travel, and how it gets stolen twice; a grad student prostitute who deals in telepathy inducing drugs that let her ‘download’ top secret documents from her client’s brains, a romp through Colorado and New Mexico during which each episode and character is more bizarre than the last; and the internet meme that seems to tie it all together. Barnes’ playful commentary on Travis’ story and his own life as a SF writer and drama teacher, interspersed with their everyday interactions with a group of funny, compelling friends, is related in a surprising and non traditional narrative that blurs the line between fact, fiction, and metafiction.

Tales of the Madman Underground

Wednesday, September 5, 1973: The first day of Karl Shoemaker’s senior year in stifling Lightsburg, Ohio. For years, Karl s been part of what he calls the Madman Underground a group of kids forced for no apparent reason to attend group therapy during school hours. Karl has decided that senior year is going to be different. He is going to get out of the Madman Underground for good. He is going to act and be Normal. But Normal, of course, is relative. Karl has five after school jobs, one dead father, one seriously unhinged drunk mother…
and a huge attitude. Welcome to a gritty, uncensored rollercoaster ride, narrated by the singular Karl Shoemaker.

Apostrophes and Apocalypses

John Barnes has been known to science fiction fans for his quirky, powerful short stories, many published in SF magazines in the late 1980s. Most of them have been unavailable for more than a decade. Now the best have been collected for the first time, along with several new SF stories that appear here for the first time ever.

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