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"Science fiction at its most exciting and thought provoking best"

In 2095, the One True controls humanity at least those living on the earth in a hive like collective intelligence. Mars is one of the few locales in which mankind retains free will though the environment still requires terraforming to make it more habitable. On Mars, Teri Murray informs her father Telemachus that she wants to drop out and marry her boyfriend Perry, but needs her dad's permission, as she is legally a minor. Her father opposes both ideas so Teri remains in school when she learns that her beloved Perry is already married.

Teri accompanies her dad escorting a group of youngsters on a special training trip. However due to a sunburst, communications die. Not longer afterward, many of her companions including her dad die. Teri takes charge of the survivors and begins the journey to safety only to find weary despondent gene-engineered humans and conclude that someone sentient attacked Mars with the sunburst.

THE SKY SO BIG AND BLACK is science fiction at its most exciting and thought provoking best. The story line first appears as a futuristic coming of age tale, but quickly expands into several varying layers to include the survivalist trek, the sunburst attack, and the starving Mars-formed genetically engineered mutants. John Barnes writes a triumphant story that keeps readers wondering what next and how did the author successfully tie everything back into a cohesive interesting story worth re-reading to grasp all the nuances.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted July 21, 2002

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 pressure suits to survive outside, and it will be a century or more before the planet's fit for terrestrial life.

Terpsichore Murray is growing up on Mars. She wants to quit school and become, like her father, an ecoprospector. He has other ideas: he wants her to stay in school. He does want her along on his next long trip but only to conduct a group of younger kids from the highlands at Mars's equator back to school in Wells City.

What happens next will change Terpsichore, will change Mars, and will open the door to a new chapter in the history of intelligent beings in the solar system . . . all of them.