Candle
John Barnes
248 pages
published in 2000
Candle is that rarest of creatures: an optimistic, upbeat John Barnes novel and what's more, it's set in the same universe as Kaleidoscope Century, one of his darkest novels ever. Candle is not a direct sequel however, though it does have one or two scenes that mean more if you have read Kaleidoscope Century. Good news to those turned off by Barnes' nature as a dark and sometimes outright sadistic writer and which was on full display in that earlier novel.
Several decades after the Memewars, Earth is united under the benign leadership of the surviving meme, One True. Everybody on Earth carries a copy of Resuna and together these copies form One True. Humanity is quietly happy, working to repair all the damage done during the wars of the 21st century. Those that didn't take kindly to having a meme running their minds for them emigrated to Mars if they could or disappeared in the wilderness to live outside of civilisation. The last of those cowboys was hunted down and reintegrated into society years ago though.
So when one night Currie Curtis Curran is waked from a deep slumber by the voice of One True calling him by his old cowboy hunting nickname Three Cur it comes as somewhat of a shock that there is still a cowboy out there -- and not just any cowboy, but Lobo, an old enemy that had cost him much of his squad members eleven years back. Currie thought he had killed him in the last ambush he ever laid, but here he was again, seemingly not even having aged either. So now Currie has to come out of retirement again for one last hunt...
Most of the story takes places in the Rocky Mountains in the heart of winter as Currie tracks Lobo down from where he was last seen. Appropriately I read it during a bitter cold Sunday in December stuck in a dismal holiday house with a splitting headache. Before too long I could almost see the metres thick snow piled up outside even though it was only a typical Dutch winter's day, grey and wet. Barnes is that good at describing the physical realities of being on a chase through the Rockies that you can almost feel yourself skying and climbing along with Currie.
Currie's hunt for Lobo is just one part of the story however. Interspliced with the main story is a series of flashbacks telling Currie's own backstory. How grew up as an orphan in an ecodome, how he became a mercenary, retelling the whole sordid history of the Memewars as was also told in Kaleidescope Century and how he ended up as a cowboy hunter for One True and inevitably became part of Resuna himself.
In the main story meanwhile Currie manages to catch up to Lobo, only to loses his copy of Resuna in a freak accident. Tracking Lobo to his lair, the two men end in a Mexican standoff and tell each other their lifestories, through which Currie learns One True lied to him. He decides to join Lobo and become a cowboy himself, but things come to a head as Resuna re-awakes...
The central conflict in Candle quite obviously is not between Currie and Lobo, but between the idea of freedom to be who
you want yourself to be and that of an utopia in which some piece of clever memeware decides that you will be happy. As a theme it
dates back to at least