Reflection's Edge: The E-Zine for Thoughtful Readers & Writers

Adam Hazard is an ordinary American—even though his father is a snake-handler instead of a proper Dominion Christian, and his best friend is the atheist nephew of the president for life, and determined to spread the highly illegal gospel of Charles Darwin. When the president rounds up draftees to fight for control of the Northwest Passage—and hopefully get rid of his troublesome nephew, to boot—what can Adam do but go along for a Picaresque adventure, and a chance to make his name as a writer of battlefield romances?

Robert Charles Wilson is perhaps the finest contemporary author of science fiction—a writer who effortlessly pairs nuanced characterization with inventive hard sci-fi premises. Neither a Jules Verne nor an H.G. Wells, he instead follows something like a Gene Roddenberry tradition: smart people who care about each other study hard and solve social problems using technology, as cultures and religions struggle to integrate new scientific knowledge. Wilson writes books that leave you optimistic about humanity, and interested in pursuing an engineering degree—and in the process, he exposes you to exhilarating ideas without letting you notice that you’ve been challenged.

Julian Comstock, unfortunately, is a rare misstep. The novel is an expansion of his 2006 novella, “Julian: A Christmas Story,” which can be read in its entirety here. Novella and novel take place in a 22nd century based loosely on 19th-century ideals. Following a series of global catastrophes, earth’s remaining population has regressed to a barely-industrial feudal economic system, and America is dominated by Puritan concepts of duty and piety. As a novella, it’s not exceptional, but it works. As a novel, it doesn’t hold up—although the story gets longer, the ideas don’t get bigger. If anything, they shrink with repetition. The more country the characters wander, the less plausible the central conceit seems, and the more the reader wishes for a map.

The book’s chief problem is its narrator—a wide-eyed backwoods kid whose friendship with a seditious atheist provokes him to question the rightness of society and the church, and to ponder whether, despite the obvious lunacy of such an assertion, Americans might once have been powerful enough to have walked on the moon itself. In the novella, which begins and ends with the narrator’s emotional and intellectual journey—and in which he is a teenager in a small town—he makes sense. In the book, his innocence grates—particularly since we know, from the introduction onward, that he is writing this book while in his forties, and that he maintains his aw-shucks innocence through two wars, marriage to a political radical, the dispatch of several rivals, countless religious debates, access to hundreds of books, the making of a motion picture, and extensive world travel. His prudishness seems like a put-on, a writerly posture in clear contrast to his actions: here is a man writing a seditious book that will surely be banned, attacking a government system, who nevertheless affects earnest ignorance and worries that a word like “Hell” might offend the ladies.

Mannered first-person is always a tightrope act—done correctly, it’s witty and memorable, but done incorrectly, it’s a smudge on the floor. In this case, the risk doesn’t pay off—the fake simpering uses of “dear reader” and similar chattiness are distancing at best, and obnoxious at worst. (Egregiously, Wilson uses the Brontëan technique of untranslated French dialog that of course the readers are meant to understand—and, worse, the narrator professes not to speak French himself, but nevertheless knows which French phrases are significant, and how to spell them. In the end, he explains that a French-speaking companion wrote them out correctly for him, sixteen years or more after the fact . . . and offers no excuse for why he didn’t ask her what they meant, nor why he included them in the narrative despite his greatly-advertised ignorance of their meaning.)

In effect, Wilson has sacrificed the two main advantages of a first-person viewpoint: he doesn’t get us closer to the character, whose politeness prevents him from discussing any but the mildest emotions and least offensive thoughts, and he continuously winks at the reader, who is meant to understand things that the narrator doesn’t (although the uncomprehending narrator nevertheless thinks these things are significant enough to describe).

Taken as a whole, the book is mainly a testament to how terrifying the Bush years were to American intellectuals, and the paranoid fatalism that kept us awake at night. Consequently, it doesn’t have much of an audience: either you’ve already worried that everyone might ignore global warming, that wealth is moving into very few hands, that evangelical Christians have broken down the separation of church and state, and that we’re moving toward an only nominally democratic dystopia—in which case, Julian Comstock doesn’t seem especially inventive—or you find the idea paranoid, offensive, or both. The overall tone is simultaneously bitter and smug—although he writes out of fear, Wilson can’t make his villains genuinely terrifying because he believes that they are stupid and absurd. It’s like a nightmare in which a three-year-old is put in charge, but is still limited to the powers of a three-year-old. Not exactly scary; not exactly reassuring.

Julian Comstock’s one shining quality is the recognition, if ham-handed, that a retreat to a “purer, simpler” past is not a great solution to a problem. This isn’t a new assertion—The Time Machine and Fahrenheit 451 are merely two notables in a genre chock full of innocent futures with horrible consequences. It is, however, good to have a reminder every few years to counter the recurring (and egotistical) fantasy that we have reached the height of civilization and must collapse into a dark age (never mind that the dark ages were a propagandistic invention of Enlightenment thinkers, or that the fall of Rome was less a fall than a societal transition).

We will always have a reason to believe that the world is ending—whether it’s caused by power plants, nuclear holocaust, communists, the movement of people to cities, the abolition of the monarchy, or the eruption of Vesuvius. It’s a brand of hysteria that disguises itself as cool rationality—the desire to take ownership of death with an “I told you so”—and one which allows quite serious people to propose that we should allow nine tenths of the world’s population to die, and return to inefficient agricultural systems. (Technology—and the social change it creates—is always the villain; the past is always simpler and therefore easier and better; and Thomas Malthus’s theory of population is taken as correct no matter how many times it has been discredited.)

This reviewer hopes Julian Comstock marks an end to the current trend of backward-looking futurism. At the very least, let us wait eagerly for the publication of Wilson’s next novel, Vortex, and in the meantime, re-read Spin.

To buy a copy of Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, click here.