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The Armies Of Memory by John Barnes
01/01/2008 . Source: RJ Barker 
pub: TOR. 429 page hardback. Price: $25.95 (US), $34.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-765-30330-2. Buy The Armies Of Memory in the USA - or Buy The Armies Of Memory in the UK  check out website: www.tor-forge.com
Giraut Leones is one of the greatest artists working within the galaxy-spanning 'Thousand Cultures', he also an agent for the Office of Special Projects and someone is trying to kill him. Giraut has plenty of enemies within The Thousand Cultures, both human and Artificial. Outside the 'Thousand Cultures' are the lost colonies who may have got hold of the 'Psypyx' containing the personality of one time OSP leader Shan and they seem to have it in for Giraut, too.
There's also the mystery of 'the Forebears' to contend with an advanced alien species who seem to have been wiped out by an unknown enemy. We follow Giraut as he tries to keep ahead of his assassins and ready humanity for what could be an annihilating onslaught and finally, he has to ask himself is he prepared to sacrifice everything to bring humanity together?
A galaxy-spanning civilisation made up of different societies and referred to as 'The Thousand Cultures' or for short, 'The Culture'. Therein lies my first major problem with this book, because Iain M Banks also writes about a galaxy spanning civilisation called 'The Culture' and he does it very well. I'm not suggesting the author has attempted to crib from Banks. He hasn't. His society and science is very different. There are no huge spaceships and in this galaxy AI's are largely subservient. Still, every time someone says 'The Culture' in this book it's hard not to immediately compare the book to Banks' work. It's a good book, but it's not Iain M Banks. It made the book difficult for me to read but if you've not read Banks or you can get over the hurdle then it's, eventually, an entertaining read. It didn't grab hold and have me reading late into the night though.
As this is the last in the series and I've not read the first there was also a sense of dislocation. I presume that a lot of characterisation has been done in the first book as, at times, I found myself getting mixed up about just who was who and doing what to whom.
This is a society that's left behind the idea of interstellar travel by people, it's all done by the Springer, a device that allows you to open a door to virtually anywhere that's been explored and just step through into a new place. The Springer is a great idea but my first thought was that it meant anyone could get into anywhere, this is a world with no privacy. The author gets around this by telling us they need a lot of power ('enough to level a mountain') to operate which is logical enough but undone completely when robots are using them to serve food in restaurants. Like in Banks' world, society is largely free of money and most production work is done by nanobots building items from a molecular level. See what I did there? 'Like in Banks' work', it's very difficult to get away from that once it's in your head.
Throughout the first part of the book I kept getting hung up on odd things. There's talk of money and budgets which doesn't ring true in a society that can make produce something from nothing. Maybe money works well in the separate societies that make up the Thousand Cultures but on the grand scale it just seems unlikely and very twentieth century. Money brings with it another bugbear, the more I read through the first part of this book the more I got the sense that the main character wasn't doing his job out of any sense of belief. Giraut Leones comes across as an idle, rich man meddling as he doesn't have much else to do though I suspect this may be intentional.
There's no sense Giraut cares. He loses his lover with not much more than a shrug before he replaces her. He's not a lothario neither, not a callous man, he just doesn't seem bothered. To be honest, by half the way through I was feeling the same. This isn't a heavily plot-driven book. Plot is secondary to relationships, explanations of how the science works and talking. There is a lot of talking. Loads. Really, occasionally it's even broken up by action but never for long. We always get back to the chatting. If you're into far future sociology then you'll probably find it all very interesting. To be honest, I'm more into far future shooting each other and I found it all a bit wearing.
Having said that. Parts two and three of this book are a different beast. Faster and the plot unravels quickly in a way that does make you want to just keep reading. The way the author re-interprets past human history is really good, too. Ideas and cultures fused together through the fuzzy lens of the past. It really works but I found myself wondering why part one had been so lacking in pace.
There's a school of thought that says there are a limited amount of ideas. To some degree I buy into in that I don't think it's a crime to find a book re-treading ideas I've read before. What matters is the way the author does it. Nearly everything in this book I've come across before and it does contain flashes of brilliance but they are flashes. If I hadn't been reviewing this book, I think I'd probably have given up on it before the end of part one.
I was left feeling like this is the first part of a larger work rather than the what it is, the final part, and it seems to stop just at the point where I felt it had got really interesting. If you're into people and relationships then this book will probably work for you as the end is more about ethics than anything else. The details of just how humanity copes with the incoming enemy is left for you to ponder on which I found frustrating, especially as the book seemed to come alive only in the later half.
RJ Barker
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