Gaudeamus by John Barnes

I was a big John Barnes booster back in my SFBC days: he was an energizing and powerful writer in the '90s, or at least I thought his books were smart and interesting and all that stuff. I liked his "Thousand Cultures" books and had very strong opinions on the "Century Next Door" books - I can't remember all the details of what I used to fulminate about Kaleidoscope Century, but I hated that book's protagonist and at the same time was fascinated with how Barnes presented him - and even his lighter adventure stuff, like Jak Jinnaka and the Timeline Wars (which I covered, a bit, in a Reading Into the Past post from 2006), was really enjoyable.

I don't seem to have written about his work here; he hasn't written as much the last decade and a half. (There was a post-apocalyptic trilogy in the Teens that I avoided, because I hate post-apocalypses, and which seems to have had publishing issues as well.)

But I'm not sure why I never read his 2004 novel Gaudeamus until now: it came out when I was reading and loving Barnes books consistently, and would have counted as work. My guess is that there's some element of those above books not doing as well for the SFBC as I hoped - though nearly everything I loved didn't sell as well as I hoped; club readers were generally Philistines who consistently preferred bland genre pap - and maybe a reader's report that said "this is a really weird one; it would be a tough sell."

And Gaudeamus is a really weird one. It's basically a big shaggy-dog story, or maybe a "no shit, there I was" story, told in the first person by "John Barnes" - a guy with all of the markers of author Barnes's real life - as told to him by his probably-fictional old friend Travis Bismarck. So already you have layers of narrative - it drops into Bismarck's voice for chapters at a time, and then back out to Barnes with just section breaks to indicate that - and something like an unreliable narrator on top of the weird, loose-limbed, told-second-hand plot.

I also have the sense that this was written in 2000-01 - mostly or entirely before a Certain Event in September - which may have delayed publication. There's a view of humanity at the end of this book, more positive and hopeful than usual for Barnes, which doesn't hit the same way as I think he intended it.

Anyway, you might want to know about the plot. Bismarck is a freelance corporate investigator - "spy" is such an unpleasant word - who gets hired by the well-connected black-box military-contractor company Xegon to look into how so many of its really, really top secrets are getting leaked. He tells the story of his investigation to Barnes over the course of several random visits from October to January - year unspecified; from internal evidence I would guess 1999 to 2000 - getting deeper and deeper into the weird stuff as he goes, but with a lot of extraneous details and endless digressions, on both levels of narrative, along the way.

I've already said once this is a shaggy-dog story, but let me say it again: it's a long, discursive, often deliberately self-obfuscating narrative that gets odder and odder as it goes, bringing in lots of quirky little details, and repeatedly breaks away just when Bismarck is about to explain something interesting.

Oh, and there are aliens. I mean, look at the cover! You know going in there are aliens. But it takes a looong time to get to the aliens, and the standard alien stuff. Instead, we have a super-drug, a mysterious machine named Gaudeamus, about a dozen other things all also named Gaudeamus, including what seems to be a prediction of the webcomic Homestuck a good decade ahead of time.

It is all pleasant to read, and the discussions by "Barnes" and "Bismarck" of women's bodies is only cringeworthy maybe two or three times. But you do have to be in the mood for a discursive, self-indulgent late-90s semi-counterculture UFO book, told in layers of self-referential narrative. I don't think a lot of people have been in that mood, frankly.

This is not one of Barnes's more commercially successful books, though I think largely because of timing and vibe, which wasn't his fault. But it's certainly a thing, and there's very little at all like it, and I don't regret reading it. If you are in the mood for something odd and quirky, this is an excellent choice.