Wilson, Robert Charles: Darwinia
Darwinia (1998)
Written by: Robert Charles Wilson
Genre: Science Fiction/Alternate History
Pages: 320 (Hardcover)
Why I Read It: A friend of mine was cleaning out his apartment back in 2005-2006, saw this book, and thought of me. Given the premise of it, and remembering what he'd read of my own writing, he thought I'd be interested. Of course, back then, any free book was a book I was interested in, so I was happy to take the book off of his hands. Of course, it languished in the TBR pile until now, when the Mount TBR challenge gave me a reason to unearth it.
The premise: ganked from BN.com: In 1912, history was changed by the Miracle, when the old world of Europe was replaced by Darwinia, a strange land of nightmarish jungle and antedeluvian monsters. To some, the Miracle is an act of divine retribution; to others, it is an opportunity to carve out a new empire.
Leaving American now ruled by religious fundamentalism, young Guilford Law travels to Darwinia on a mission of discovery that will take him further than he can possibly imagine...to a shattering revelation about mankind's destiny in the universe.
Darwinia is a 1999 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel.
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. Part of the reason is so I can try and work out my understanding of the novel. If you're spoiler-phobic, feel free to jump down to "My Rating" and you'll be safe and sound. If you're not, or if you've read the book, onward!
If there's one thing Robert Charles Wilson does well (and mind you, this is only the third book of his I've read, despite it being the first of his I've owned), it's opening with a sense of wonder. The beginning of Darwinia reminded me very much of the beginning of Spin, which was my first and still my favorite novel by Wilson. Of course, in some ways, it's rather easy to evoke that sense of wonder: gather a group of people together, describe something magical/frightening/unusual in the night sky, and voila! Though I should be fair: I'm sure many a writer has written a similar scene and it lacks the power of wonder. Wilson deserves credit where credit is due: he knows how to pull people in, and wonder isn't an easy thing to achieve, even if the ingredients are rather obvious to me.
Unfortunately, after that beginning sense of wonder, it faded for me. Mostly in part because really, I didn't have any expectations for the book, so while reading, I found myself thinking, "Okay, this is going to be some kind of explorer of the new land novel, only it's an alien landscape on Earth." Which, honestly, did not sound like any fun. For the longest time, and this was the time I was questioning whether or not I really wanted to continue reading, I felt I might as well have picked up some kind of historical piece about Cortez or someone exploring South America, because I kept seeing Darwinia as a tropical continent, and my mind filled in the blanks, despite any alien descriptions provided.
And then things got weird.
For starters, there was Vale. For the longest time, Vale's was the only POV that kept me interested, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me what the big deal was about the Finch expedition or any of that, and because Vale had an outsider's view, and because his god was so interested, I had rather hoped to get some answers, because all we get at first are omninous predictions that no one will make it out alive, but unlike, say, the film Jurassic Park, where the viewers know what's in store for the upcoming heroes thanks to the opening scene (which is a weird comparison, but hey, it's tropical!), we don't see Darwinia as anything dangerous, but rather something strange and unexplained. That should imply danger, of course, and of course, there IS danger. But this sense that the expedition is off to certain death? Not so much, so I was never very anxious for the characters.
Until they started getting killed.
Now, I'm done with the book now and I have a faint understanding of what went down and why. But yet in some ways, it's still utterly confusing for me. Wait, confusing is the wrong word: vague, hard to explain would be a better way of describing my feelings about what went down and why.
Anyway, when we reached part two, I was invested. Part of what really helped was reading Guilford's journals in the first person POV, and I really rather wish all of Guilford's sections were written from the first person POV, because those were more immediate and more vivid for me as a reader. Learning that people WANTED the group to fail was fascinating and frightening, and really heightened the danger, because it's wasn't just the expedition versus nature, but it was the expedition versus man, which we actually learn is something far different, and worse.
And then there was this little explanation on page 198 that just sent my brain utterly spinning:
"But the two worlds aren't strictly separate anymore.That's what the Conversion of Europe was all about, not to mention that so-called city you wintered in. The two worlds are tangled up because there's something wants to destroy 'em both. Maybe not destroy, more like eat -- well, it's complicated."
And then we get this crazy, insane bombshell (and mind you, this is MY understanding of what went down. I may be WRONG, but this is what I came away with): when the conversion happened, it was an event that caused a parallel universe. In the one universe, the conversion didn't happen, life carried on as normal, and we had all the wars our history has taught us. In the second universe, where the conversion did happen, Europe was swallowed whole by this Darwinia, its people vanished, and life just didn't follow the same outline as the primary universe did.
And because of this, we've got two Guilfords. The one who never experienced conversion and fought and died in World War I, and the one who did experience conversion and is exploring Darwinia at the expense of his sanity.
I say that because that quote from above? Comes from the "ghost" of his primary WWI dead self. Or something.
Oh, what a mind-bender of a book. And there's more!
From pages 213 and 214:
He suggested -- in broad daylight and in the plainest language -- that the world around me, the world you and I inhabit, is nothing more than a sustained illusion inside a machine at the end of time.
And this, from page 214:
It gets more complicated. When we were a "history book," Caroline, every event, every action, was predetermined, a rote repetition of what had gone on before -- though of course there was no way we could have known that.
But psilife has injected "chaos" (his word) into the system -- which is the equivalent of what the theologians call "free will"!
Which means, the picket said, that you and I and all the other sentient beings who had been "modeled" in the Archive have become independent, unpredictable moral entities -- real lives, that is; new lives, which Sentience is sworn to protect!
Mind blown? Yeah, mine is too, and I read the whole book.
It's a lot of food for thought, and this novel is a great many things: alternate history, science fiction, suspense thriller, all with ghosts, philosophy, aliens and war filling out these pages. War's an interesting topic here, because the book is divided into parts, and every part is dated.
The Conversion happens in 1912. The expedition (parts one and two) happens in 1920 or so. Real life parallel: World War I happened from 1914-1918.
Part three happens in 1945, when Guilford has tried so hard to make a normal life for himself, but he's learning that his parallel ghostly counterpart is right, and there's more to this world than he wanted to accept, and people want him dead because of it. Real life parallel: World War II, 1939-1945.
Part four happens in 1965, and it's the final battle between the ghostly parallel counterparts (turns out, everyone in the expedition had them, and of course, there were more besides) against the people like Vale, whose gods take over their bodies in a bid to consume the Earth (I guess?). Real life parallel: Vietnam War, 1955-1975.
The point: every part of this book, every time period, there is strife and conflict. Sometimes its on a wider scale, sometimes it's on more of a personal scale, but there is conflict, and there is plenty of violence and death to go around. And I point that out because even though this is easily an alternate history, this parallel world isn't without its conflict, and interestingly enough, those conflicts parallel what happened in the primary, original world in terms of dates.
In other words, no matter what happens, there will always be conflict. It's inevitable, and sometimes I think Wilson was trying to say that it absolutely has to happen, and it has to happen at a certain time in history, that there's no avoiding it, despite free will and all that jazz.
Of course, I could be reading it wrong. But eerily enough, and this was published in 1998, and while I was obviously alive and old enough to know what was going on, I was a self-absorbed high school/college student that year (and the years before, just high school), so I can't tell you what conflicts were going on in the mid to late nineties. What I can say, and what's eerie, is that 1999 isn't far from 2001, when September 11 happened, and it makes me wonder: the end of this book, there's mention that Guilford may not be done fighting and protecting yet, and wouldn't it be interesting to know what's going on in this parallel world Wilson's created during that time period when the primary world (aka the real world, aka OUR world) was going through the tragedy of 9-11?
One thing I did notice that for either side, it was always men who were possessed by gods (the bad guys) or whose doubles they'd merged with (the good guys). I suppose the good guys make sense, since at least in Guilford's case and his expedition, they were all in the same company in the first World War. But that's where it gets confusing. Was it only soldiers who were used? Or just anyone who died in the primary world but was still alive in the parallel/secondary world? In other words, why weren't there any women?
I have no answers for that. I'm not ashamed to say I didn't understand the book quite well enough to even remotely come up with answers for that. I'm just throwing it out there in case anyone reading this does have answers. :)
Once it got out of the expedition, the book did have some interesting moments and poignant parts. One particular line stood out to me on page 300:
What did dying mean, when the world was made of numbers?
Isn't that just chilling? It chills me, because this isn't the Matrix we're talking about here. It's a real world, yet being rewritten. Hmm… The Matrix came out in the summer of 1999, a year after this book was released. I wonder if there are any comparisons and contrasts between the two. They're utterly different, but that line alone connects them.
My Rating: Worth Reading, with Reservations
Even though this was the first Robert Charles Wilson book to ever come in my possession, I'm really glad it's not the first one I ever read. Not to say that this one was bad, but I'm not sure it would've left enough of a strong impression on me back then to read more of the author's work, whereas Spin was one of my favorite novels that I read in 2011. Be that as it may, this book does have a dizzying amount of things to offer: alternate history/parallel worlds, philosophy, suspense and thrillers, evolution and aliens, intergalactic conflict. It's certainly fascinating, and almost something that deserves two readers so that readers can really sink their teeth into what's going on, why it's going on, and therefore really appreciate the story. It's not a book that you can read with the television on, or while under the influence of cold medicine. It's a book that requires your absolute attention, and that's not a bad thing. It's just a thing to be aware of. The opening is great, but the rest of the book had its ups and downs for me. Definitely worth reading, but be focused when you do.
Cover Commentary: It's rather appealing, though I will say that if I didn't know the premise of the novel, I wouldn't think the book was a strange alternate history or anything, so in that sense, I think the cover could do a better job showing the alien-ness of the land, just to grab the reader's attention a little better.
Next up: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu