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Candle (novel)
Encyclopedia
Candle is a science fiction
novel
by John Barnes
that was published in 2000, it is part of the author
's Century Next Door series.
One True
, the story is narrated
in the first person
by its main character, forty-nine-year-old Currie Curtis Curran, a retired mercenary
soldier and “cowboy hunter” who is recalled from retirement to capture “Lobo” Dave Singleton, the last of the cowboys, people who have remained beyond of the control of One True by retreating into the Colorado wilderness
.
Currie’s contact with One True is through a copy of the Resuna
“meme”, a “neurocode” program uploaded into the brain, and an implanted “cellular jack” radio device. In addition to communicating with One True, Resuna monitors its host’s thoughts and emotions, provides everyday information and communication, downloads requested memories or skills, adjusts their physiology, and, when offered the spoken code phrase “let overwrite, let override”, can assume control of its host’s body, and erase memories. Resuna learns its host’s preferences and habits, is friendly and communicative, and can even play chess
with its host or engage in other pastimes.
Ten years before, Currie was the leader of a team of cowboy hunters who captured Lobo’s cowboy gang after a long pursuit in which several of the team were killed and several, including Currie, badly injured. During their final confrontation, Currie sees Lobo fall from a high cliff, apparently to his death. In his briefing by One True, Currie is shown the recorded memories of a mother and daughter beaten, raped, and robbed by Lobo days earlier. Although such emotions are normally kept in check by Resuna, Currie is allowed to feel revulsion and hatred of Lobo, to improve his performance as a hunter. One True explains to Currie that, to decrease his chance of being detected and evaded, he has been assigned to hunt Lobo alone.
After goodbyes to his wife of 23 years, Mary, Currie is dropped of by diskster (a futuristic, automatically piloted hovercraft) with various high-tech equipment, including an advanced cold weather suit, shape-adjusting ski
/snowshoe
s, and a shelter that self-assembles from collected carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen
matter.
Within days, Currie is captured by Lobo, awakening after many days unconscious from the severe blow to his head that incapacitated him in a comfortable, geothermally-heated underground lair, to discover his copy of Resuna no longer responding to his mental or spoken requests. Nursed back to health by Lobo/Dave, the two men exchange life stories, which are so similar they joke that they could be brothers. No longer controlled by Resuna and One True, Currie agrees to join Dave in an effort to hide from One True.
About half of the book consists of Currie and Dave’s telling of their personal and the Earth’s general history. Among the details revealed are that the beatings and rapes shown to Currie were fabrications, and that the mother and child are actually Dave’s wife and child, who were captured and “turned” by One True during the “Meme Wars”, giving them false memories of their history, from which, during Dave’s actual visit to them to obtain medicine and supplies, he was able to temporarily free them.
Currie’s search for Dave resulted in enough information being uploaded that they must abandon his lair and attempt to build another, while remaining undetected by One True’s network of surveillance satellites
. While caching supplies, Currie has a skiing fall, and, shaken up and angry, reflexively says “let overwrite, let override”, to find himself immediately calm. A little later, he realizes that after saying the trigger phrase, he was unconscious and under the control of his Resuna for several minutes, during which time it/he carelessly left a trail visible to satellites, and, he assumes, Resuna uploaded information to One True, though he is still unable to make the usual mental contact with Resuna. Hurrying to their old lair to warn Dave, he discovers in a previously unexplored room there a suspended animation
device, unmentioned in Dave’s story, and beyond anything he could have constructed himself. Dave informs him that, while he was unconscious, Dave used various means to burn out his cellular jack, assuring that even if his Resuna reactivated, it would be unable to contact One True, and promising to tell him the omitted parts of his story after they have fled to safety.
After abandoning the first lair, while the two work to excavate their new one, Dave tells more of his life story. As Dave reaches its conclusion, Currie realizes that his disabled Resuna is not due to his head injury, but due to Dave uploading an additional meme, “Freecyber”. Although designed during the Meme Wars to disable other memes, principally One True, Dave’s story explained that every version of Freecyber had “mutated” into as controlling a meme as the ones it was intended to fight. Enraged, Currie attacks Dave, and is on the verge of killing him when Dave shouts “let overwrite, let override”, disabling Currie, and flees.
Upon regaining consciousness, Currie finds his Resuna fully functional, though still unable to contact with One True. He pursues Dave, arriving at the original lair to discover him already captured by a large team of hunters. Making no effort to fight or hide, Curry joins them, and returns to his home and civilization.
Back in civilization, a cellular jack is installed in Dave’s head, but One True is unable to load a functioning Resuna in his brain. Currie’s Resuna is behaving atypically, indicating to he and it that it has become a true, human-like person. He neither requests nor is compelled to have his burnt-out jack repaired, and demands to be allowed to speak with One True via eyes and ears. One True speaks with him, explaining that his Resuna is an experimental version designed to interact with Freecyber, and that his mission was planned to result in his capture in order for One True to obtain a “wild copy” of the last generation of Freecyber for its research. As a learning AI, One True explains, it is dissatisfied with its lack of true human empathy and the lack of freedom accorded humans under the present scheme, and seeks to change it, without allowing human society to return to its previous warring, suffering state.
The story closes a few years later, with Dave, his wife Nancy, Currie, and Mary listening to Dave’s daughter Kelly give a philosophical speech at her high school graduation, while Currie, his cellular jack repaired, converses with One True about Kelly’s speech, the reluctance of many people to replace their old, more controlling version of Resuna with new ones, and the nature of the human experience.
described Candle as "a novel that genuinely turns on the quality of its ideas, familiar as some of those ideas may be. . . . [T]he fact that Candle turns out, in the end, to be a philosophical novel with a stimulating debate at its center ought not to be held against it. Barnes is at least asking us to look the seductive surface of one of SF's moist popular current buzzes and examine what the idea of memes might actually tell us about matters of freedom and human nature."
Locus reviewer Russell Letson found the novel to be "one of the more intriguing, ingenious, and entertaining chunks of the conversation [in science fiction] about freedom and responsibility, collective good, and individual needs."
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by John Barnes
John Barnes (author)
-Writing:Two of his novels, The Sky So Big and Black and The Duke of Uranium have been reviewed as having content appropriate for a young adult readership, comparing favorably to Robert A. Heinlein's "juvenile" novels...
that was published in 2000, it is part of the author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
's Century Next Door series.
Plot summary
Set in the year 2087, on a nearly crime-free Earth in which humans are under the telepathic control of the artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
One True
One True
One True is the fictional hegemonic software program that takes control of individual human minds and entire human societies in John Barnes' two Meme Wars novels Candle and The Sky So Big and Black; the novel Kaleidoscope Century details the years leading up to its existence. All three books are...
, the story is narrated
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
in the first person
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
by its main character, forty-nine-year-old Currie Curtis Curran, a retired mercenary
Mercenary
A mercenary, is a person who takes part in an armed conflict based on the promise of material compensation rather than having a direct interest in, or a legal obligation to, the conflict itself. A non-conscript professional member of a regular army is not considered to be a mercenary although he...
soldier and “cowboy hunter” who is recalled from retirement to capture “Lobo” Dave Singleton, the last of the cowboys, people who have remained beyond of the control of One True by retreating into the Colorado wilderness
Rocky Mountains
The Rocky Mountains are a major mountain range in western North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch more than from the northernmost part of British Columbia, in western Canada, to New Mexico, in the southwestern United States...
.
Currie’s contact with One True is through a copy of the Resuna
One True
One True is the fictional hegemonic software program that takes control of individual human minds and entire human societies in John Barnes' two Meme Wars novels Candle and The Sky So Big and Black; the novel Kaleidoscope Century details the years leading up to its existence. All three books are...
“meme”, a “neurocode” program uploaded into the brain, and an implanted “cellular jack” radio device. In addition to communicating with One True, Resuna monitors its host’s thoughts and emotions, provides everyday information and communication, downloads requested memories or skills, adjusts their physiology, and, when offered the spoken code phrase “let overwrite, let override”, can assume control of its host’s body, and erase memories. Resuna learns its host’s preferences and habits, is friendly and communicative, and can even play chess
Chess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
with its host or engage in other pastimes.
Ten years before, Currie was the leader of a team of cowboy hunters who captured Lobo’s cowboy gang after a long pursuit in which several of the team were killed and several, including Currie, badly injured. During their final confrontation, Currie sees Lobo fall from a high cliff, apparently to his death. In his briefing by One True, Currie is shown the recorded memories of a mother and daughter beaten, raped, and robbed by Lobo days earlier. Although such emotions are normally kept in check by Resuna, Currie is allowed to feel revulsion and hatred of Lobo, to improve his performance as a hunter. One True explains to Currie that, to decrease his chance of being detected and evaded, he has been assigned to hunt Lobo alone.
After goodbyes to his wife of 23 years, Mary, Currie is dropped of by diskster (a futuristic, automatically piloted hovercraft) with various high-tech equipment, including an advanced cold weather suit, shape-adjusting ski
Ski
A ski is a long, flat device worn on the foot, usually attached through a boot, designed to help the wearer slide smoothly over snow. Originally intended as an aid to travel in snowy regions, they are now mainly used for recreational and sporting purposes...
/snowshoe
Snowshoe
A snowshoe is footwear for walking over the snow. Snowshoes work by distributing the weight of the person over a larger area so that the person's foot does not sink completely into the snow, a quality called "flotation"....
s, and a shelter that self-assembles from collected carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen
CHON
CHON is an mnemonic acronym for the four most common elements in living organisms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen....
matter.
Within days, Currie is captured by Lobo, awakening after many days unconscious from the severe blow to his head that incapacitated him in a comfortable, geothermally-heated underground lair, to discover his copy of Resuna no longer responding to his mental or spoken requests. Nursed back to health by Lobo/Dave, the two men exchange life stories, which are so similar they joke that they could be brothers. No longer controlled by Resuna and One True, Currie agrees to join Dave in an effort to hide from One True.
About half of the book consists of Currie and Dave’s telling of their personal and the Earth’s general history. Among the details revealed are that the beatings and rapes shown to Currie were fabrications, and that the mother and child are actually Dave’s wife and child, who were captured and “turned” by One True during the “Meme Wars”, giving them false memories of their history, from which, during Dave’s actual visit to them to obtain medicine and supplies, he was able to temporarily free them.
Currie’s search for Dave resulted in enough information being uploaded that they must abandon his lair and attempt to build another, while remaining undetected by One True’s network of surveillance satellites
Spy satellite
A spy satellite is an Earth observation satellite or communications satellite deployed for military or intelligence applications....
. While caching supplies, Currie has a skiing fall, and, shaken up and angry, reflexively says “let overwrite, let override”, to find himself immediately calm. A little later, he realizes that after saying the trigger phrase, he was unconscious and under the control of his Resuna for several minutes, during which time it/he carelessly left a trail visible to satellites, and, he assumes, Resuna uploaded information to One True, though he is still unable to make the usual mental contact with Resuna. Hurrying to their old lair to warn Dave, he discovers in a previously unexplored room there a suspended animation
Suspended animation
Suspended animation is the slowing of life processes by external means without termination. Breathing, heartbeat, and other involuntary functions may still occur, but they can only be detected by artificial means. Extreme cold can be used to precipitate the slowing of an individual's functions; use...
device, unmentioned in Dave’s story, and beyond anything he could have constructed himself. Dave informs him that, while he was unconscious, Dave used various means to burn out his cellular jack, assuring that even if his Resuna reactivated, it would be unable to contact One True, and promising to tell him the omitted parts of his story after they have fled to safety.
After abandoning the first lair, while the two work to excavate their new one, Dave tells more of his life story. As Dave reaches its conclusion, Currie realizes that his disabled Resuna is not due to his head injury, but due to Dave uploading an additional meme, “Freecyber”. Although designed during the Meme Wars to disable other memes, principally One True, Dave’s story explained that every version of Freecyber had “mutated” into as controlling a meme as the ones it was intended to fight. Enraged, Currie attacks Dave, and is on the verge of killing him when Dave shouts “let overwrite, let override”, disabling Currie, and flees.
Upon regaining consciousness, Currie finds his Resuna fully functional, though still unable to contact with One True. He pursues Dave, arriving at the original lair to discover him already captured by a large team of hunters. Making no effort to fight or hide, Curry joins them, and returns to his home and civilization.
Back in civilization, a cellular jack is installed in Dave’s head, but One True is unable to load a functioning Resuna in his brain. Currie’s Resuna is behaving atypically, indicating to he and it that it has become a true, human-like person. He neither requests nor is compelled to have his burnt-out jack repaired, and demands to be allowed to speak with One True via eyes and ears. One True speaks with him, explaining that his Resuna is an experimental version designed to interact with Freecyber, and that his mission was planned to result in his capture in order for One True to obtain a “wild copy” of the last generation of Freecyber for its research. As a learning AI, One True explains, it is dissatisfied with its lack of true human empathy and the lack of freedom accorded humans under the present scheme, and seeks to change it, without allowing human society to return to its previous warring, suffering state.
The story closes a few years later, with Dave, his wife Nancy, Currie, and Mary listening to Dave’s daughter Kelly give a philosophical speech at her high school graduation, while Currie, his cellular jack repaired, converses with One True about Kelly’s speech, the reluctance of many people to replace their old, more controlling version of Resuna with new ones, and the nature of the human experience.
Reception
Gary K. WolfeGary K. Wolfe
Gary K. Wolfe is a science fiction editor, critic and biographer. He is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Pilgrim Award, the Eaton Award, BSFA award and been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Related Book. He has had a monthly review column in Locus since 1991...
described Candle as "a novel that genuinely turns on the quality of its ideas, familiar as some of those ideas may be. . . . [T]he fact that Candle turns out, in the end, to be a philosophical novel with a stimulating debate at its center ought not to be held against it. Barnes is at least asking us to look the seductive surface of one of SF's moist popular current buzzes and examine what the idea of memes might actually tell us about matters of freedom and human nature."
Locus reviewer Russell Letson found the novel to be "one of the more intriguing, ingenious, and entertaining chunks of the conversation [in science fiction] about freedom and responsibility, collective good, and individual needs."