John Barnes

John Barnes (born 1957) is an American science fiction writer known for the novels Orbital Resonance (1991), A Million Open Doors (1992) and Mother of Storms (1994). He was born on 28 February 1957 in Angola, Indiana.

Barnes studied at Washington University in St Louis and the University of Montana and took a PhD in theatre at the University of Pittsburgh; he has also worked in systems analysis, business statistics and software reliability. His first story appeared in 1982 and his first novel, The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, in 1987. Orbital Resonance opened the sequence later known as The Century Next Door, which continued with Kaleidoscope Century (1995), Candle and The Sky So Big and Black (2002). The Thousand Cultures series began with A Million Open Doors and continued with Earth Made of Glass (1998), The Merchants of Souls (2001) and The Armies of Memory (2006). Mother of Storms, about a runaway hurricane system, was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel. He co-wrote Encounter with Tiber (1996) and The Return with Buzz Aldrin, and his young-adult novel Tales of the Madman Underground was a Printz Honor Book in 2010. Later work includes Directive 51 (2010).

For collectors: most of Barnes's novels were first published by Tor in New York, including Orbital Resonance, A Million Open Doors and Mother of Storms, his three best-known books of 1991 to 1994.