Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Million Open Doors | 1992 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 2 | Earth Made of Glass | 1998 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 3 | The Merchants of Souls | 2001 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 4 | The Armies of Memory | 2006 | John Barnes | Buy |
A Million Open Doors introduces Giraut as a young man on Nou Occitan, a world that has reconstructed troubadour culture as a deliberate social experiment. He is sent to a very different world – a Puritan, utilitarian colony – as part of a cultural exchange program, and the collision between these two extreme societies drives the first novel’s conflict. Barnes builds both cultures with care and treats neither as simply wrong, which gives the book an unusual texture for a first novel.
The subsequent books send Giraut to other worlds, each with its own carefully constructed cultural logic. Earth Made of Glass takes him to a colony divided between Tamil and Mayan populations on the edge of catastrophic conflict. The Merchants of Souls returns him to a civilization debating whether to commercially exploit uploaded personalities of dead people. The Armies of Memory closes the series with Giraut older and more senior, confronting both external threats and the accumulated weight of his own long life.
The series is among Barnes’s most ambitious work, combining adventure plots with genuine anthropological and philosophical engagement. Barnes studied under a range of influences including literary science fiction, and the Giraut books reflect that breadth.