John Barnes

Author Information
John Barnes's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    46 Books (7 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1987
  • Latest Book:
    July 2022
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Full Series List in Order

A Barry and Rebecca Forester Adventure

Death in Montevideo (Apr-2012)
Death in Sentari (Apr-2012)

Daybreak

1 - Directive 51 (Apr-2010)
2 - Daybreak Zero (Mar-2011)
3 - The Last President (Sep-2013)

Giraut

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

Jak Jinnaka

1 - The Duke of Uranium (Sep-2002)
2 - A Princess of the Aerie (Jan-2003)
3 - In the Hall of the Martian King (Jun-2009)

Meme Wars

1 - Kaleidoscope Century (May-1995)
2 - Candle (Dec-2000)
3 - The Sky So Big and Black (Aug-2002)

Timeline Wars

1 - Patton's Spaceship (Jan-1997)
2 - Washington's Dirigible (May-1997)
3 - Caesar's Bicycle (Oct-1997)

Timeraider

1 - Wartide (Mar-1992)
2 - Battlecry (Jul-1992)
3 - Union Fires (Dec-1992)

Book List in Order: 46 titles

  • The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky

  • Isaac Asimov Presents Sin of Origin

  • Sin of Origin

    • / Science Fiction
    • Buy Buy

  • Orbital Resonance

    SOMETIMES THE ONLY WAY TO SAVE A PLANET IS TO LEAVE IT BEHIND... Melpomene Murray's concerns are those of any teen-ager: homework, friends, dates. But Melpomene lives on the Flying Dutchman, an asteroid colony located thousands of miles from an Ea...

  • Wartide

    Timeraider - 1

    Don Sampson, a much-decorated Vietnam veteran, finds himself transported back to February 1944 and into the midst of the Allies' Italian campaign, where he is caught up in a desperate mission to foil the deployment of a last-resort German weapon. Ori...

  • Battlecry

    Timeraider - 2

  • A Million Open Doors

    Giraut - 1

    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 wind...

  • Union Fires

    Timeraider - 3

    ETERNAL SOLDIER Vietnam veteran Daniel Samson wears the torn and bloodied uniform of humanity at war. He is the Eternal Soldier -- traveling through time to fight the battles of history.... CIVIL WAR May 5, 1864. Virginia. An espionage mission to fr...

  • Timor and the Furnace Troll

    in Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters



  • 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 civilizatio...

  • Kaleidoscope Century

    Meme Wars - 1

    Joshua Ali Quare wakes in 2109 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 o...

  • One for the Morning Glory

    The Tale began when young Prince Amatus secretly sipped the forbidden 1 Wine of the Gods, leaving him half the lad he'd once been--literally--for his left side suddenly vanished without a trace! But, as is often the case in Tales of this sort, the...

  • Patton's Spaceship

    Timeline Wars - 1

    A mysterious foe wages a war of mutilation, annihilation, and extermination across a million alternate Earths, bent on the ultimate goal of enslaving the universe, with only the Crux Ops team, a Pittsburgh private eye, and a ten-year-old child standi...

  • Washington's Dirigible

    Timeline Wars - 2

    The second volume in the time travel/parallel universe series sends Pittsburgh private eye Mark Strang, trained with nightmarish weaponry and teamed with the woman of his dreams, to an alternative 1776, where he becomes his own worst enemy. Original....

  • Caesar's Bicycle

    Timeline Wars - 3

    In order to stop the alien Closers, who have waged war on a million alternate Earths, private eye Mark Strang gathers his assortment of weaponry and confronts a mysterious closing of the Timelines. Original....

  • Apostrophes and Apocalypses

    Before novels like Mother of Storms, A Million Open Doors, Finity, and Earth Made of Glass, John Barnes was known for quirky, powerful short stories, many published by SF magazines in the late 1980s. Now the best of them are finally collected--along ...

  • Earth Made of Glass

    Giraut - 2

    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 ...

  • Finity

    VERTIGO! Lyle Peripart's world is coming apart. Up to just a few days ago he was an obscure professor, quietly unenthusiastic about the Reichs that have dominated the world since the Axis victory over a century ago--but not looking for a fight wit...

  • Candle

    Meme Wars - 2

    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 ha...



  • The Merchants of Souls

    • / Science Fiction
    • Buy Buy
    Giraut - 3

    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 ...

  • The Sky So Big and Black

    Meme Wars - 3

    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 ...

  • The Duke of Uranium

    Jak Jinnaka - 1

    In this spectacular tale of action and intrigue, a thirty-sixth-century young man discovers that the galaxy is far more complex, and deadly, than he'd ever imagined... THE BAD SIDE OF ENTROPY For eighteen-year-old Jak Jinnaka, life in the Hive sp...

  • A Princess of the Aerie

    Jak Jinnaka - 2

    When Jak gets word that his ex-girlfriend, Princess Shyf of Greenworld, is in danger, Jak and his panth buddy Dujuv join the Royal Palace Guard and race across the solar system to save her. But they quickly discover that they're the ones who need to ...

  • 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 equip...

  • The Armies of Memory

    Giraut - 4

    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 limitles...

  • In the Hall of the Martian King

    Jak Jinnaka - 3

    With the soul of thirty-sixth-century humanity at stake, Jak Jinnaka steps in . . . now we're really in trouble Jak Jinnaka parlayed his powerful family connections, unearned media fame, and consistent dumb luck into a cushy job as vice procura...

  • 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 d...

  • Directive 51

    Daybreak - 1

    Heather O'Grainne is the Assistant Secretary in the Office of Future Threat Assessment, investigating rumors surrounding something called Daybreak. The group is diverse and radical, and its members have only one thing in common-their hatred for the ...

  • Daybreak Zero

    Daybreak - 2

    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 ...



  • Retirement

    The need to make sense of old age lies at the heart of this provocative novel. We watch what happens to a handful of old men in a 55+ retirement community as they deal with adultery, deception, happiness, death, third marriages, sex, success, adult c...

  • Poga

    A fantasy short story about a girl who finds her soul in her sock drawer, a waif in her cabin, and love in the homicide squad. This is somewhere in that odd boundaryland between magical realism, urban fantasy, and I don't know I just made it up. Peop...

  • Rod Rapid and His Electric Chair

    A short story originally published in HelixSF. A brain scientist and a policeman desperately try to figure out why one brilliant biologist tricked the world into total ecocide; the clues seem to lie in some of the worst boys' adventure books ever wri...

  • The Quiet Guy It Always Was

    Short story, 5700 words, most people can read it in less than an hour. R-rated if that matters to you, and if it does, you probably won't like it. Ever know one of those quiet guys who seemed to get around a lot? Ever wonder what it was like to be on...

  • Things Undone

    This story was tied for second (with two others) for the Sturgeon Award for Short Fiction; I have long since ceased to caper about chanting, We're One Third Of Number Two! It also made it into the Gardner/Strahan Best of the Year anthology. So it co...

  • Every Hole Is Outlined

    I love ghost stories. Not modern romances that have plots that are sort of about ghosts (who resemble vampires that don't bite), not contemporary urban fantasies where ghosts are fedora-wearing detectives or femmes fatales solving the mystery of the...

  • The Lost Princess Man

    This is a short story that I wrote for the Dozois/Strahan anthology The New Space Opera II (Eos 2009). I know for some people space opera means Star Trek-style adventures of Captain Lance Squarejaw staring down the tentacled menace with crouton torpe...

  • An Ocean is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away

    This is a short story, or rather a novelette, originally published in Jim Baen's Universe in 2007. I guess you could call it my favorite three everythings plus my favorite kitchen sink; there are kinds of scenes and characters I just really enjoy wr...

  • Death in Montevideo

    A Barry and Rebecca Forester Adventure

    In sleepy Montevideo, Uruguay at the tip of South America, Barry and Rebecca battle a vicious, sexually voracious female Chinese CEO and a heavily muscled 6’3” psychopath with a PhD nicknamed ‘the Pole.’ As the killings mount and the danger i...

  • Death in Sentari

    A Barry and Rebecca Forester Adventure

    When Sentaran Muslim terrorists attack their safari lodge and the slaughter of tourists begins, young and naïve Americans Barry and Rebecca flee in panic. Together they find haven high in nearby mountains, but mistaken for invading mercenaries, purs...



  • Losers in Space

    It is the year 2129 . . . and fame is all that matters Susan and her friends are celebutantes. Their lives are powered by media awareness, fed by engineered meals, and underscored by cynicism. Everyone has a rating; the more viewers who ID you, th...

  • Raise the Gipper!

    Are you feeling trapped between Barack and a hard place?Do you wish the crazy righties would keep their Mitts out of your life?Does it seem like a really, really long time till November 2012?Does everything this election year seem like brainless, ran...

  • The Last President

    Daybreak - 3

    John Barnes delivered a fascinating and frightening scenario about the collapse of America’s political and social infrastructure following the destruction of modern technology. Now, the author of Directive 51 and Daybreak Zero continues his story o...

  • The Timeline Wars

    Blending alternate history, time travel, and detective thriller, the “able and impressive” Nebula and Hugo Award nominee gives us Nazis, Tories, and togas (The Washington Post).   An attack by time-hopping terrorists turns Mark Strang’s li...

  • 18

    “ Golf. It’s what lights us up. It’s our passion. That light you have that is yours and yours alone. It means more than you know to others, without even trying to impress them. It inspires, enables others to rise. It makes people happy.” Crai...

  • The 2020 Look at Mars Fiction Book

    This collection puts together 20 of the best science fiction stories about Mars published over the past two decades by top-notch authors of the genre. An improbable group of astronauts are slingshot to Mars in cheap one-person, one-way jalopies in Te...

  • The End

    This is not your classic love story. "The End" is an ambitious and thought provoking tale set at the end of the world -- filled with wars, earthquakes, flooding, and more. Shining light on some of life's most pertinent questions, this is an ambitious...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

John Barnes has published 46 books.

John Barnes does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, The End, was published in July 2022.

The first book by John Barnes, The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, was published in January 1987.

Yes. John Barnes has 7 series.
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