Currie Culver is about fifty-five years old, in good health, living in a comfortable retirement in the Rockies with his wife. In the wake of the Meme Wars that swept the planet two generations before, Currie, his wife, and almost everyone on Earth have in their minds a copy of One True, software that grants its hosts limited telepathy and instills a kind of general cooperation.
In his younger days, Currie hunted "comboys"--people who had unplugged from the global net in order to evade One True, and who hid in wilderness areas, surviving by raiding the outposts of civilization. Now Currie is called back into service to capture the last comboy still at large, a man who calls himself Lobo. With his high tech equipment, thoroughly plugged into the global net, Currie sets out to bring Lobo in.
Instead, Lobo captures Currie, and manages to deprogram him. Thrown back on the resources of his own intelligence, courage, and wisdom for the first time in twenty-five years, Currie finds himself in a battle of minds with his captor . . . with results that will change the lives of everyone on Earth.
In the best tradition of John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein, Candle is a novel about individualism and society that will leave readers breathless, arguing, and demanding more.
The back cover of the book gives a synopsis. The story starts with the chase, the cowboy hunter, Currie, trying to track down the cowboy, Lobo. A cowboy being an individual that isn't running a copy of Resuna, and is not controlled by One True. Then we get Currie's back story, some more present action, Lobo's (now with a name, Dave Singleton) back story and the conclusion.
The story is told by Currie. His feelings towards One True go back and forth. One True and Resuna are his constant companions fulfilling his mental health needs. Then after he is dememed we hear his back story and some of the atrocities that One True had done in order to seize control of the world, even though now One True is all about cooperativeness and ecological repair. Even Dave says that it's hard to hate One True.
The chase section is a little long and goes into some detail. Currie telling us every time he takes a ration bar and eats it. I guess that gives Barnes more time to give us interaction between Currie and his copy of Resuna, and set more of a picture of what his character is like. The back stories of Currie and Dave were interesting and gave us insight into the characters and the history of the Meme war era.
Very entertaining and thought provoking. Candle works very well as a stand alone novel without having to have read the earlier Meme War books, Orbital Resonance and Kaleidoscope Century.
