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Books

An imaginative twist to alternative history


'Darwinia'
by Robert Charles Wilson

Saint Martin's Press, $22.95

Review by L.D. Meagher

(CNN) -- In a fundamental way, every science fiction story begins with the question "What if?" What if an alien intelligence had planted the seeds of human evolution? What if a human child were born and raised on Mars? What if history was a predictive science?

Robert Charles Wilson poses the question, "What if the continent of Europe disappeared on a March night in 1912, and was replaced by an unknown, untamed, unpopulated landscape?" His answer to the question is "Darwinia". The novel takes its name from the disparaging moniker the Hearst newspapers hang on this terra incognita. The conversion of Europe was instantaneous; everything familiar about the continent -- cities, plants, and animals -- is gone. In its place is an utterly alien environment, with its own plants and animals, but no people.

Wilson writes, "The generally accepted explanation for the Miracle was that it had been just that: an act of divine intervention on a colossal scale ... An event had taken place in defiance of everything commonly accepted as natural law; it had fundamentally transformed a generous portion of the EarthÕs surface in a single night. It's only precedents were Biblical."

Guilford Law was celebrating his 14th birthday at the moment of the change. From his home in Boston, he and his family watched an unexpected display of lights in the eastern sky. It was only later that they understood it signaled the change on the other side of the Atlantic. Eight years later, Law is a member of the first American expedition to the interior of Darwinia. He is a photographer, and has signed onto the adventure in the hope of making a name for himself. He leaves his wife and their young daughter in the rough frontier town that has sprouted on the banks of the Thames River, and sets off for the unknown.

Months pass, and contact with the expedition is lost. Law's wife and daughter find themselves trapped in the new London during an attack by the U.S. Navy. As the town burns, they flee with a British military deserter to start a new life in Australia.

Meantime, in the United States, a small-time con man named Elias Crane has set up shop in Washington as a spiritualist. Only he's not conning anyone. He really can make mental contact with some sort of spirit. He believes it is a god, and that the services he provides the god will bring him immorality. Sometimes, Crane wonders if he's mad. Then he meets another man who is in contact with a similar spirit.

In the foothills of the Alps, Guilford Law and the few other survivors of the expedition stumble upon what appears to be an abandoned city. Law concludes it is a remnant of a civilization that existed in Darwinia long before its appearance on Earth. At the center of the city in an enormous dome, housing a broad staircase leading downward into the bowels of the Earth. Three men set off to see what lies at the bottom of the staircase. The leader falls seriously ill. Law is left alone with him as his other companion heads back to their base camp for help. Alone, cold and hungry, Guilford Law huddles in the dark on the vast stone staircase and gets a glimpse of the truth about Darwinia. He escapes, and makes his way back to England, only to find his family gone, the city in ruins, and a stranger stalking him.

The stranger seems oddly insubstantial; he's dressed as a soldier, though Law doesn't recognize the uniform. He does recognize the face. It is his own. From this apparition, Law learns that the past several years of his life haven't happened. Darwinia exists only in a sort of virtual reality archive. In the real world, Law had grown up and had gone off to fight in the war that ravaged Europe in the second decade of the 20th century. He died there. The soldier that he sees is, for want of a better term, his soul. It has been enlisted in a cause far larger than the Great War. It is acting on behalf of a galaxy-girdling intelligence, which constructed the archive to preserve the records of intelligent life on a multitude of planets. The conversion of Europe to Darwinia inside the archive was not a Miracle. It was an act of war.

Law doesn't really understand what this wraith is telling him, and he believes it even less. But as the years pass and he tries to get on with his life, he discovers that he doesn't get any older. He never gets sick. Any wound he sustains heals in minutes. He has settled on the coast of Italy with a new wife and child. He gets a visit from Tom Compton, another survivor of the failed expedition. Compton also hasn't aged. And he knows the story of the archive. He's had visits from his own apparition, who died alongside Law fighting that European war. The two men are thrust into this other, larger conflict when minions from the other side, known as psions, attack Law's home. They are men like the spiritualist Crane, directed by an alien intelligence.

Robert Charles Wilson has taken the sci-fi convention of the alternative history and given it an imaginative twist. His novel has a scope that is sometimes breathtaking. Not only does he give the reader a guided tour of a mysterious land that has appeared where Europe ought to be, he draws a much larger picture of entire galaxies as sentient entities, locked in a titanic struggle. The shift in focus is jarring, but it enriches the adventure. In the end, the conflict that engulfs vast expanses of the universe is decided on a human scale, in an abandoned alpine city with a dome at its center.

Too often, science fiction novels provide either a really big idea (Arthur C. Clarke's "3010" is an example) or a grand adventure (any "Star Wars" tie-in). In "Darwinia", there is room for both.

L.D. Meagher is a News Editor at CNN Headline News. He has worked in broadcasting for nearly 30 years.

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