Darwinia?

Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia: A Novel of a Very Different Twentieth Century is just that. The premise is that in 1912, the continent of Europe is replaced by an unearthly wilderness. The geography is the same, but it's been supplanted by a completely new ecosystem. All of Europe's humans and human artifacts have disappeared, and turn-of-the-century America is left to deal with the mystery.

Wilson is good at building up the bizarre situation, and showing how people try to cope with and rationalize something that they will never be able to explain. With that in mind, I would almost rather than Wilson not have explained it; the phenomenon works better as a pure mystery than as the convoluted futuristic plot that develops.

"Darwinia" is a name given the continent as a joke, which somehow sticks in spite of the American embrace of fundamentalism. (I suspect that Wilson just liked the name too much to give it up.)

Character development is decent; the plot starts off with a bracing amount of weirdness, and if it doesn't sustain that, it's nonetheless very readable throughout.

The Red Prophet Picture Book

Orson Scott Card is best known for his novel Ender's Game, which is fair enough. I like it a lot myself.

But my favorite Card novel is Red Prophet, the second novel in his "Alvin Maker" series about a fantasy frontier America where folk magic works.

Alvin is the seventh son of a seventh son, and this mystical conjugation makes him a Merlin-like figure of magical destiny. The first novel dealt with all this; and it was certainly interesting. But Red Prophet goes into the broader world, where ambitious White men plot among and against each other, and Red Indians are slowly dying of rampant alcohol addiction.

Two brothers seek to change this: Tenskwa-Tawa, the Red Prophet of the title, who wants to segregate Red men from White men and pursue his vision of a great Crystal City; and Ta-Kumsaw, the great military leader, who simply wants to drive the White men from North America entirely.


If Ender's Game is a story about how institutions (especially the military) use and exploit people for their own purposes, Red Prophet is about religion and social reform. That is probably part of why I like it better; it's a theme that's closer to my heart.

So I was quite taken to find that there's a graphic novel version of Red Prophet. I bought the first volume and eagerly consumed it.

In retrospect, I could have guessed that there would be problems.

Card has a very strong narrative voice in this book. It's not just happening, as many novels try to suggest, with you as an observer; someone is telling you this story. (If I remember correctly, the series actually confirms this at some point; the narrator is Taleswapper.)

This doesn't translate at all well into comics format, where the ideal is to show things visually. Visually presenting the events of the book loses almost all of the appealing style.

And so they don't. Instead, they cram as much text as they possibly can into text boxes. Virtually every panel in every page is loaded with a few sentences from the novel. The effect is to make it a sort of Red Prophet Picture Book- an unhappy compromise that loses the advantages of both novel and graphic novel formats.

Some novels don't make good comic books. That isn't a sign that anything is wrong with them; it just means that the novel format has its own specific advantages, which other media don't share. Foremost among these advantages is the ability to get inside someone's head- to share their thoughts and feelings.

Card is good at this. Comics aren't. It's a sad way to realize the fact; but at least I've learned something from the Red Prophet graphic novel, after all.

The Multiverse Isn't a Subplot!

Today's book of consideration is James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation; there will be some minor spoilage, I'm afraid. (But only minor!)

The novel begins in an alternate history where the Axis had a very successful World War II. It's now 1975, and America and Australia are the only non-Axis nations left in the world; but it's only a matter of time for them.

So they develop time-travel, planning to go back to the early 1940s and change a few things; and make their world, in the process, very much like the one we live in today. But things are much more complicated than they first appear.

(Here go my minor spoilers!)


The Americans actually stole time-travel from the Nazis; or rather, from the 21st-century renegades who decided they'd prefer a Nazi world to their original history. So ours isn't the first history, or the second, but the third; the original course of history is an idyllic world where Europe reached a better ending to WWI, and averted the bloody course of the late 20th century altogether.

So far, so good. I love time-travel stories. And while I'm skeptical of utopias (something I've been seeing a lot of in Hogan) the neatness of the history-behind-a-history-behind-a-history appealed to my juvenile sense of wonder.

But then things get annoying.

It turns out that changing history doesn't scale forward: the Utopia world and the Nazi world keep going on, regardless of what changes occur in 1940. That's a standard trope of time-travel stories, and it seems to resolve some paradoxes.

But these parallel worlds aren't related to the time-travel changes. They're borne of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in which every possible position of an electron manifests in an entirely different universe. So the time-travellers are never really interacting with their own history at all (I think. But, really, who can tell?)

I don't mind the Many-Worlds Hypothesis; it can certainly be the basis for some fascinating science fiction. But it makes a lousy subplot. It's too big; not just in size, but in implications. It affects everything. Any fair treatment of it will tend to overwhelm any other story the author's trying to tell.

Greg Egan's done some good work with the concept: particularly his brilliant Permutation City, which I hope to review someday soon. But he does this good work by acknowledging the way the multiverse has a radical impact on the basic ideas that we take for granted.

Proteus wasn't a bad novel; and I'm still a sucker for time travel. But this treatment removes the logical paradoxes that are the mainstay of time-travelling fun. With that taken away, it's more like a period piece.

Paths to Utopia

We're underway this week, so I visited the used bookstore and found several James P. Hogan novels. Regular WaW readers (ha!) may recall that I read his Inherit the Stars last month; happily, one of the books I've found is the sequel, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.

But this post is about Paths to Otherwhere, a novel about geopolitics and parallel Earths.

Scientists dealing with the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics are being brought together in Los Alamos for a secretive government project to draw information from parallel realities. Things become much more complicated when the researchers start crossing over into these realities, by... well, it's never really understood, but it's sort of like astral projection. For brief periods, they find their consciousness transferred into the body of their alternate self on other worlds.

The military- which is desperately seeking means to deal with an impending world war- sees this as being even more of an intelligence boon than they were expecting. The scientists use the technique to explore the vast realm of human possibility, and end up discovering a world without war.


The good parts: the characters are better-drawn than in Inherit the Stars. Hogan resists the urge to make military people into cardboard cutouts, in spite of the fact that the military is basically the villain of the story. He has fun with parallel-reality computation, especially at the start of the book; I almost wish he'd stuck with examining the implications of these.

The bad parts: the assassination subplot doesn't make much sense. There's less conceptual ping-pong than there was in Inherit the Stars (although this isn't necessarily a bad thing.) And the utopia world is, well, utopia; and Hogan doesn't do enough to make me believe it could work.

Come to think of it: the big problem is that it's set into a historical context. Their world is one where WWI ended early, in a fairer negotiated settlement; and this allowed human progress throughout the 20th century ending in a better place for everyone. That's not unbelievable, in itself; but it becomes jarring when we read that the economy is based on people giving money away. Because it's set so clearly in history, it's hard to suspend disbelief as I would with a pure-fantasy utopia.

But I'm going into some depth on that point because the novel made me think about it; which is fun and worthwhile on its own merits.