Every Hole Is Outlined

by John Barnes

Overview

I love ghost stories. Not modern romances that have plots that are sort of about ghosts (who resemble vampires that don't bite), not contemporary urban fantasies where ghosts are fedora-wearing detectives or femmes fatales solving the mystery of their own fatalite -- no, I mean real ghost stories, the kind of thing that you hear around a campfire on a cold fall night, that leaves you shivering and terrified in your sleeping bag. The kind of thing you read late at night during a thunderstorm that makes you wonder what will happen when you turn out the light and dive under the covers.

What I love are the sort of supernatural encounter stories like Maria Leach collected to terrorize a whole generation of schoolchildren, stories like the milk bottles on the grave, or "thanks for bringing Sandy home." They don't fit anybody's template for what fiction is supposed to be, nowadays, but they grip the brain like a cold, soggy-fleshed, bony hand stroking your neck at midnight, and grab your attention like that almost-seen almost-face at the window that dares you to look again.

So besides loving those, I'm also a hard science fiction writer, and to let you in on a little secret, we all love relativity, because the time dilation that is found in the Lorentz contractions is such nice, simple, easy to do math. Relativistic starships are the hard-sf writer's friend.

And then every story should have a hard problem, artistically, either something to make the writer sweat or something for the writer to vault over with pretended ease, and in this case it was the idea of writing about the deep future, a time as remote in the future as the Cro-Magnon, Clovis, or Mungo people are in the past.

So it happened this time that I saw a way for ghosts, and relativity, and the deep future to all be in a story together, along with some speculation about what sort of people might be able to live in starships, and here we are. The story was first published in Jim Baen's Universe in 2006, and reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction in 2007.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014029759
Publisher:	Metrocles House
Publication date:	01/24/2012
Series:	John Barnes Short Story Collection , #5
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	188 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. Twitter address is @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.