The Merchants of Souls continues the series of novels that Barnes began with A Million Open Doors. In this third volume, Barnes takes his protagonist, Giraut Leones, and his (now ex-) wife Margaret to the Earth of his distant future interstellar civilization and reveals some of that civilization’s deepest conflicts, so deep that they are normally invisible even to organizations as Giraut’s employer, the Office of Special Projects.

Barnes’s future Earth is still the center of humanity, with many billions of inhabitants; at one point Giraut contemplates the future Singapore, a vast enclosed city, and remarks that it contains one-seventeenth of humanity. To many of these people, nothing off Earth is quite real—and often this shrinks further, to nothing outside their own social circle, or even nothing outside their own minds. In Barnes’s world, most people work for a few years, and then retire, with no concern except entertainment, and providing that entertainment is Earth’s biggest industry.

This is the most obvious engine driving Barnes’s plot. In a fairly straightforward extrapolation from today’s video games, he shows a future where people can go into enclosed virtual environments and live out whatever fantasies suit them. This is called "going into the Box," and many people spend virtually their entire lives there, never interacting with another real human being at all. Anything that makes these virtual lives richer and more entertaining is in demand. And it happens that another aspect of Barnes’s future both offers a way of meeting that demand, and uses up resources that could be spent instead on entertainment. Barnes envisions a technology, the psypix. that can record memories as people form them, and if they die, can be implanted either into a friend’s brain, or into a newly grown body. Whether this is really immortality is too metaphysical a question for this review; in Barnes’s world, many people regard it that way. But to other people, including a large share of Earth’s population, those memory records are raw material that could to used in entertainment, providing fictional characters with richer personalities at lower cost—to everyone except the person whose memories are used.

Giraut, as it happens, is currently wearing the psypix left by his friend Raimbaut; and he is also a poet and musician of as much fame as is possible in Barnes’s world. So his service recruits him to go to Earth and help work against the proposed measures. Barnes shows the difficulties of doing this in a culture where any concern with truth is largely forgotten, and arguments are treated purely as a formal contest in which style matters as much as substance. Giraut and Raimbaut find that trying to show the truth of their views is seen less as wrong than as quaint and old-fashioned, or even in bad taste. Then, as their efforts finally begin to have some effect, deeper conflicts come into view, including conflicts within the Office of Special Projects.

The last part of the novel reveals the true actors, and their identity shows that the world isn’t what it appeared to be, not even to Giraut.

As I’ve said in other reviews, Barnes doesn’t seem to be a libertarian, at least in any usual sense. But this novel, like some of his others, has things to say that will interest libertarians. His future, inward-looking Earth is a persuasive dystopia, much like the Chinese Empire under the Ming, when the mandarins persuaded the Emperor that nothing outside of China had any value, and China’s admirals were ordered to dismantle their fleet—a choice that cost China dearly when the Europeans came to their shores a few centuries later. The recent discovery of another humanoid races remains suggests that a similar encounter might await humanity in Barnes’s setting. Barnes’s implied advocacy of continued exploration is one readers of Prometheus will sympathize with.

Also, the immediate problem on which this story focuses is clearly one of property rights; in fact, of what Murray Rothbard called the most basic property right, self-ownership. Ownership of the self is precisely what is at issue in this story, in a peculiarly vivid sfnal form in which the "self" takes on a concrete embodiment as an object that can be seized or destroyed. Barnes’s plotline about the opposition between people who want to treat other people’s selves as a resource for public use—or, arguably even worse, for private commercial exploitation—and people who want to protect them from this use through a requirement for consent is right down libertarian lines. Readers may also see disturbing analogies to current controversies over the privacy of medical records (which is applicability rather than allegory, to arrow a distinction from Tolkien).

Barnes’s deeper plot isn’t a libertarian one, but it asks questions about libertarianism—difficult and interesting questions without obvious answers. Barnes writes of

… a value system that was both cold and profound: they had learned to value efficiency in the delivery of services, and creativity in the invention of new services, and most of all the joining of the two … one vast happiness machine for the human race—or rather, a pleasure machine, for a machine can grasp pleasure, but it can’t grasp the notion of love, or amour-propre challenge, or worthiness, or being able to look in a mirror and like what you see.

This passage overtly refers, in Barnes’s setting, to computers; but the opening lines are a quite exact characterization of capitalism as a social system, and of the values that it embodies. And Barnes’s imagined future society and technology thus provides a way of setting up the market system that libertarians praise, and the sense of the integrity of the self that is at the heart of the individualism in which libertarianism is rooted, and asking whether they are not ultimately incompatible. Joseph Schumpeter raised this question in Capitalism. Socialism, and Democracy, asking if capitalist institutions contained the seeds of their own destruction; Barnes asks it at the level of values, asking whether libertarian values are internally consistent. I’m not sure if there is a libertarian answer to this question; if there is not, we should be grateful to Barnes for asking it.

John Barnes is an uneven writer, but at his best a brilliant one. For reasons of his own—whatever those are—he’s spent a lot of time hanging out with libertarians. It’s a pleasure to see, in this novel, that he’s learned things from us that he can use for his own purposes. It’s an even greater pleasure to have the chance to learn something from him.