Darwinia
   Robert Charles Wilson
  1998 TOR A Tom Doherty Assoc. Inc. NY USA
   ISBN: 0312860382


A very different 20th century comes about after the Miracle, when populated & tamed Europe, in a haze of unearthly light, is replaced by strange jungles & stranger creatures, renamed Darwinia. Americans come to this wild new land, fleeing their nation's fanatical religious ferment, while others are drawn there to explore.

Marvelous read! Strange, troubling, provocative & redemptive. Made me do a lot of thinking about Fate; how the idea of Evolution must have shaken our ancestors to their core; about the Biblical in life; about the replacement of the old & familiar with the new & unbelievable &, in the end, what is believable & why do we place such importance on that.

Robert Charles Wilson has indeed created a New World as exotic, dread filled & alien as ever the old New World was to our exploring ancestors. I was reminded of Joseph Kastner's A Species of Eternity.

In Darwinia we see sights of alarming & utterly untamed wilderness like none we've seen before & yet, the topography is so familiar. We learn of how the remains of the British Empire has survived & begun to reclaim England.

While Nature is anarchy & this Miracle is anarchy beyond people's normal understanding, once the brash Americans begin joining the Empire settlers in the New Old World, they bring their own brand of anarchy.

Something else, however, is going on. Something entirely different, entirely otherworld & entirely scary. Sometimes the hairs on the nape of my neck literally stood up with alarm as I read.

What an exciting, strange & surreal read Robert Charles Wilson has created. It boggles the mind & yet, enchants, beckons the reader as only the unexplored can.

More by Robert Charles Wilson: A Hidden Place; Memory Wire; Gypsies; The Divide; A Bridge of Years; The Harvest & Mysterium
(05/26/99)

Rebecca