An Ocean is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away

by John Barnes

Overview

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 writing, and I saw a way to put a couple of my favorite kinds of characters into some of my favorite scenes. So there's a self-sufficient loner who is famous for something he no longer cares about, and a mildly histrionic type who's so obsessed with what things mean that she doesn't see what they are, and I've put them into the landscape of a terraforming-in-process Mars, along with some really big explosions, desperate struggle for survival, ironic obligations and forced choices, but mostly some really big storms and explosions and descriptions of an alien landscape. Come on along and have some fun.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014040792
Publisher:	Metrocles House
Publication date:	01/24/2012
Series:	John Barnes Short Story Collection , #4
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	183 KB

About the Author

My thirtieth commercially published novel will be coming out in spring 2012. I've published about 4 million words that I got paid for. So I'm an abundantly published very obscure writer.

I used to teach in the Communication and Theatre program at Western State College. I got my PhD at Pitt in the early 90s, masters degrees at U of Montana in the mid 80s, bachelors at Washington University in the 70s; worked for Middle South Services in New Orleans in the early 80s. I do paid blogging mostly about the math of marketing analysis at TheCMOSite and All Analytics. If any of that is familiar to you, then yes, I am THAT John Barnes.

Which, of course, is why you can find my blog at thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com. On Twitter I am JohnBarnesSF.

There are also many Johns Barneses I am not. I am not the British footballer, the Australian rules footballer, the former Red Sox pitcher, the Tory MP, the expert on ADA programming, the biographer of Eva Peron, the authority on Dante, the mycologist, the travel writer, the guy who does some form of massage healing that I don't really understand at all, the oil executive, the film historian, or that guy that Mom said was my father. I do wish I'd written that book on titmice, though.

I used to think I was the only paid consulting statistical semiotician for business and industry in the world, but I now know four of them. So now I have a large market share of a growing field.

Semiotics is pretty much what Louis Armstrong said about jazz, except jazz paid a lot better for him than semiotics does for me. If you're trying to place me in the semiosphere, I am a Peircean (the sign is three parts, ), a Lotmanian (art, culture, and mind are all populations of those tripartite signs) and a statistician (the mathematical structures and forms that can be found within those populations of signs are the source of meaning). The branch in which I do consulting work is the mathematics and statistics of large populations of signs, which has applications in marketing, poll analysis, and annoying the literary theorists who want to keep semiotics all to themselves.

I have been married three times, and divorced twice, and I believe that's quite enough in both categories. I'm a hobby cook, sometime theatre artist, and still going through the motions after many years in martial arts.