Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Orbital Resonance | 1991 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 2 | Kaleidoscope Century | 1995 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 3 | Candle | 2000 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 4 | The Century Next Door | 2000 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 5 | The Sky So Big and Black | 2002 | John Barnes | Buy |
The Century Next Door series spans roughly a century of future history, beginning with Orbital Resonance in 1991, which follows a teenager born and raised on a space habitat who has never set foot on Earth. The novel is unusual in science fiction for treating its generation-ship setting as normal background rather than as spectacle, and for taking seriously the social norms that would develop in such an isolated, high-stakes environment.
Subsequent books shift perspective to other characters living through different phases of the same future history. Kaleidoscope Century follows a soldier-turned-mercenary whose fragmented memories reveal the violent history of the twenty-first century. Candle moves to a far-future Earth struggling under a vast artificial intelligence, while The Sky So Big and Black returns to the human-scale story of a young woman navigating a terraforming Mars. The omnibus The Century Next Door collects the first three novels.
The series is notable for Barnes’s willingness to portray dark social and political futures without easy resolutions. The books ask hard questions about memory, identity, and what people preserve when civilizations break down.