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…
