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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
A frighteningly plausible dystopian premise, well conceived characters, but the plot doesn't sustain through to the end.
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1456594.html
Rather fortuitously I read this novel while also working through Gibbon's chapters in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire on Julian the Apostate, the mid-fourth century Roman emperor who tried to reverse his uncle's adoption of Christianity and failed. (See here, here, here and here.) Julian Comstock, nephew of the 22nd century president of a post-apocalypse America, is modelled a bit on his namesake of 1800 years earlier, though there are some significant differences of detail - Julian Comstock is not promoted to junior co-ruler by his uncle, he is not proclaimed emperor by his own troops, he doen't have to march across a disputed continent to claim the throne, his uncle doesn't conveniently die of natural causes, Julian doesn't then take up arms against the traditional enemy to the East, and then doesn't die in battle. It should also be added that the real Julian the Apostate was a fervent pagan believer rather than an atheist, was never forced to enlist in the army under a false name, and was a writer of polemics and satires - sometimes self-deprecating - but certainly could not have written a musical screenplay about the life of Charles Darwin.
Still, it's interesting to compare the two narratives - Gibbon on Julian the Apostate, Wilson on Julian Comstock - because in the end both are about rulers who acquire imperial office through family relationships and military success, and then try to reverse the evangelical Christian regime established by their predecessors. (I haven't read Gore Vidal's novel Julian, which may be a more direct source than Gibbon for Wilson). There isn't a lot of suspense in either case; we have a pretty good idea how things are going to turn out. The reader's interest in both stories is engaged by the incidental details of the plot and the way in which the story is told.
As to the details, both writers are covering a world we barely recognise. Gibbon has Julian proclaimed Emperor in the great hall of the Roman baths in Paris, which we can still see today. Wilson has the presidential residence located in New York's Central Park. Wilson of course has the harder task here, as he is inventing a setting rather than retrieving it from historical accounts, and there are only three groups of settings described in much detail - the small village where Julian and the narrator grow up, the battlefields of Canada, and New York when Julian arrives as ruler. Wilson's future America has suffered economic and military catastrophe, and seems not to have many non-white people in it (though it does have invading Europeans and persecuted Jews). For Gibbon's past Roman Empire, the big catastrophe is yet to come, though he sees his Julian as the last, lost hope of reversing the Decline and Fall. Each story has a central military set-piece, the army of the West's march from Gaul to the middle Danube and the battle of Goose Bay (in both cases prepared by the central character's earlier military successes) and Wilson has the edge over Gibbon here as he can make up an eyewitness account rather than try to analyse other people's reports.
The most memorable feature of both stories is the way that they are told. The delight of reading Gibbon is that he thinks he is smarter than the reader, and nonchalantly shows it at every stage. Wilson's narrator, Adam Hazzard, is probably not as clever as the reader, and probably not as good a novelist as he thinks he is; luckliy for us, both the woman he falls in love with and his friends Julian and Sam are smarter than he is, and this drives the book's humourous side. As for the central character, though, I found Gibbon's Julian more interesting and convincing than Wilson's. (NB that the author in both cases is sympathetic to the project of rolling back Christianity, though Gibbon disapproves of the details of the attempted restoration of pagan superstition and Wilson's narrator isn't as sure of the virtues of the project in the first place.) The similarity of background and basic plot is there; but Wilson's Julian, once he gains power, starts to become dictatorial while also writing a screenplay about his hero, Darwin; Gibbon's Julian as emperor seems much more consistent in character with his behaviour before gaining power (including his continued literary output).
A final point on languages. Gibbon can nonchalantly throw in extended footnotes in Latin (in fairness, he doesn't do this often) in the expectation that the reader of 1781 will be able to follow the argument without too much difficulty. Wilson has the odd phrase in French (mostly from the narrator's Canadian lover) and most strikingly a letter in Dutch (p. 189) from an enemy soldier, killed in Canada, to his lover; I wonder how many readers will follow it (no translation is given) and get the rather grim joke about the dog on the next page?
Rather fortuitously I read this novel while also working through Gibbon's chapters in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire on Julian the Apostate, the mid-fourth century Roman emperor who tried to reverse his uncle's adoption of Christianity and failed. (See here, here, here and here.) Julian Comstock, nephew of the 22nd century president of a post-apocalypse America, is modelled a bit on his namesake of 1800 years earlier, though there are some significant differences of detail - Julian Comstock is not promoted to junior co-ruler by his uncle, he is not proclaimed emperor by his own troops, he doen't have to march across a disputed continent to claim the throne, his uncle doesn't conveniently die of natural causes, Julian doesn't then take up arms against the traditional enemy to the East, and then doesn't die in battle. It should also be added that the real Julian the Apostate was a fervent pagan believer rather than an atheist, was never forced to enlist in the army under a false name, and was a writer of polemics and satires - sometimes self-deprecating - but certainly could not have written a musical screenplay about the life of Charles Darwin.
Still, it's interesting to compare the two narratives - Gibbon on Julian the Apostate, Wilson on Julian Comstock - because in the end both are about rulers who acquire imperial office through family relationships and military success, and then try to reverse the evangelical Christian regime established by their predecessors. (I haven't read Gore Vidal's novel Julian, which may be a more direct source than Gibbon for Wilson). There isn't a lot of suspense in either case; we have a pretty good idea how things are going to turn out. The reader's interest in both stories is engaged by the incidental details of the plot and the way in which the story is told.
As to the details, both writers are covering a world we barely recognise. Gibbon has Julian proclaimed Emperor in the great hall of the Roman baths in Paris, which we can still see today. Wilson has the presidential residence located in New York's Central Park. Wilson of course has the harder task here, as he is inventing a setting rather than retrieving it from historical accounts, and there are only three groups of settings described in much detail - the small village where Julian and the narrator grow up, the battlefields of Canada, and New York when Julian arrives as ruler. Wilson's future America has suffered economic and military catastrophe, and seems not to have many non-white people in it (though it does have invading Europeans and persecuted Jews). For Gibbon's past Roman Empire, the big catastrophe is yet to come, though he sees his Julian as the last, lost hope of reversing the Decline and Fall. Each story has a central military set-piece, the army of the West's march from Gaul to the middle Danube and the battle of Goose Bay (in both cases prepared by the central character's earlier military successes) and Wilson has the edge over Gibbon here as he can make up an eyewitness account rather than try to analyse other people's reports.
The most memorable feature of both stories is the way that they are told. The delight of reading Gibbon is that he thinks he is smarter than the reader, and nonchalantly shows it at every stage. Wilson's narrator, Adam Hazzard, is probably not as clever as the reader, and probably not as good a novelist as he thinks he is; luckliy for us, both the woman he falls in love with and his friends Julian and Sam are smarter than he is, and this drives the book's humourous side. As for the central character, though, I found Gibbon's Julian more interesting and convincing than Wilson's. (NB that the author in both cases is sympathetic to the project of rolling back Christianity, though Gibbon disapproves of the details of the attempted restoration of pagan superstition and Wilson's narrator isn't as sure of the virtues of the project in the first place.) The similarity of background and basic plot is there; but Wilson's Julian, once he gains power, starts to become dictatorial while also writing a screenplay about his hero, Darwin; Gibbon's Julian as emperor seems much more consistent in character with his behaviour before gaining power (including his continued literary output).
A final point on languages. Gibbon can nonchalantly throw in extended footnotes in Latin (in fairness, he doesn't do this often) in the expectation that the reader of 1781 will be able to follow the argument without too much difficulty. Wilson has the odd phrase in French (mostly from the narrator's Canadian lover) and most strikingly a letter in Dutch (p. 189) from an enemy soldier, killed in Canada, to his lover; I wonder how many readers will follow it (no translation is given) and get the rather grim joke about the dog on the next page?
Billed as a post-oil dystopia, this book reads like historical fiction, since all the technologies revert back to the level of the 19th century. It's one of those science fiction books that shows an imaginable future, and it is remarkably sly in the way that it reflects back on our current era.
A future history text of sorts? Yeah, pretty much. It's a sci-fi/fantasy type thing, but only because it takes place in the future after the fall of the US following the end of oil. It's a book with a pretty blatant message, but the message isn't overwhelming the story, making this one of my favorite reads this year. Grab this one.
From Robert Charles Wilson, author of Spin, comes an original future tale in the style of The Postman and Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. It is the 22nd century and our world is a different place, just as we know it will be. After the halcyon days of the early 21st century, there were decades of war and suffering and a reset for the planet. After the Efflorescence of Oil and a number of cataclysmic events: The Fall of the Cities, the Plague of Infertility, the False Tribulation, and the days of the Pious Presidents, the American flag now stands proud with sixty stars and thirteen stripes under the control of the Dominion. But one man named Julian Comstock is looking to change that.
President Deklan Comstock rules with a mighty fist, hand in hand with the Dominion, subjugating Americans while sacrificing thousands of troops in the ongoing war against the “mitteleuropans”. He has already sent his brother into harms way and had him “sacrificed,” keeping his rule as President certain. But in the small town of Athabaska his nephew Julian Comstock is a young boy with dreams of becoming a great man. Told from the viewpoint of his best friend who has hopes of becoming a writer, Adam Hazzard chronicles Julian’s life from a young age as close friends, to fighting in the army and become a national hero, to overthrowing his evil uncle and becoming rightful president. Always a leader, he has goals of ending the rule of the Dominion and reestablishing the former atheistic doctrine, the age of reason, and celebrating his hero, the great Charles Darwin, in a biographical film. Told in a strong, chronicling voice, Julian Comstock is a powerful novel.
Wilson has created an incredible and memorable world with some fascinating events that have come to pass. While the story of Julian Comstock is an important one, readers are left wanting more about the last century and exactly why things are the way they are, what’s going on with the rest of the world exactly, and what’s in store for the future. This is hopefully a strong first book in a series that will explore this unforgettable world that Wilson has put so much work in creating.
For more reviews, check out the BookBanter site.
President Deklan Comstock rules with a mighty fist, hand in hand with the Dominion, subjugating Americans while sacrificing thousands of troops in the ongoing war against the “mitteleuropans”. He has already sent his brother into harms way and had him “sacrificed,” keeping his rule as President certain. But in the small town of Athabaska his nephew Julian Comstock is a young boy with dreams of becoming a great man. Told from the viewpoint of his best friend who has hopes of becoming a writer, Adam Hazzard chronicles Julian’s life from a young age as close friends, to fighting in the army and become a national hero, to overthrowing his evil uncle and becoming rightful president. Always a leader, he has goals of ending the rule of the Dominion and reestablishing the former atheistic doctrine, the age of reason, and celebrating his hero, the great Charles Darwin, in a biographical film. Told in a strong, chronicling voice, Julian Comstock is a powerful novel.
Wilson has created an incredible and memorable world with some fascinating events that have come to pass. While the story of Julian Comstock is an important one, readers are left wanting more about the last century and exactly why things are the way they are, what’s going on with the rest of the world exactly, and what’s in store for the future. This is hopefully a strong first book in a series that will explore this unforgettable world that Wilson has put so much work in creating.
For more reviews, check out the BookBanter site.
I think this author could make me read anything and relish it!
About 70 pages in, and I'm loving this one. I imagine this may be intentional, but it reads a bit like a post-apocalyptic Tom Sawyer so far.
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Almost done with this one. A really good read. The story really is about a possible 22nd-Century America, but the characters are interesting enough, and there is enough plot, to keep me pretty happy. Mostly, though, I just love the style of writing, using a first-person narrator to convey the time and place through how he's providing us with the story.
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Finished up the last 100 pages last night. A satisfying ending, if more sad than I had seen coming. I'll likely pick up Spin next...
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Almost done with this one. A really good read. The story really is about a possible 22nd-Century America, but the characters are interesting enough, and there is enough plot, to keep me pretty happy. Mostly, though, I just love the style of writing, using a first-person narrator to convey the time and place through how he's providing us with the story.
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Finished up the last 100 pages last night. A satisfying ending, if more sad than I had seen coming. I'll likely pick up Spin next...
Quite a well-written blend of an American future dystopia and Civil War perspectives. An enjoyable read, although the closing chapters seemed a little less well-handled than the rest of the book.
I read this book for the first time a long time ago, before I started using Goodreads again. I don't usually write reviews of books I read so long ago, but I was inspired after reading this quote from [a:Nalo Hopkinson|27528|Nalo Hopkinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1361387199p2/27528.jpg]:
The quote seems to be tongue-in-cheek, but this phenomenon literally, no-kidding happened while I read this book and I had to tell the Internet about it. I genuinely thought that the fact that all the characters seemed to be white was an intentional part of the worldbuilding, and it was going to turn out that there had been some sort of ethnic cleansing or mass relocation or something (in my defense, this would not have been out of place in the worldbuilding of the book--for instance, it is illegal to practice Judaism in the world presented here). Then it was offhandedly mentioned that there was an Egyptian immigrant community in New York, and I realized that Wilson had completely failed to grapple with race in this book. And, you know, a lot of books fail to grapple with race. But this is a book that tries to be about religious extremism, classism, and a neo-Victorian worldview. Not dealing with race in a book like this is a massive, glaring blindspot.
Anyway, I liked the idea of this book. I really liked the writing style, which had a very 19th-century boys-adventure-story sort of tone that I thought was true to life and worked very well. A lot of steampunk authors either don't try to do this at all, or can't do it properly. I also really liked the narrator as a character.
But the whole sensibility of the book was dated even when it came out. It came out in 2009 and it was one of those anti-Bush screeds. And, look, I hate Bush, too. But it felt really flat and tedious to be reading a book full of Professional Wrestling-caliber cheap heat. The book felt shallow and it didn't seem to have anything to say.
Also, it completely fell apart at the end. It was a total trainwreck.
“My friend Ian Hagemann, a regular at Wiscon, once said on a panel that when he reads science fiction futures that are full of white people and no one else, he wonders when the race war happened that wiped out the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn’t mentioned such an important plot point.”
The quote seems to be tongue-in-cheek, but this phenomenon literally, no-kidding happened while I read this book and I had to tell the Internet about it. I genuinely thought that the fact that all the characters seemed to be white was an intentional part of the worldbuilding, and it was going to turn out that there had been some sort of ethnic cleansing or mass relocation or something (in my defense, this would not have been out of place in the worldbuilding of the book--for instance, it is illegal to practice Judaism in the world presented here). Then it was offhandedly mentioned that there was an Egyptian immigrant community in New York, and I realized that Wilson had completely failed to grapple with race in this book. And, you know, a lot of books fail to grapple with race. But this is a book that tries to be about religious extremism, classism, and a neo-Victorian worldview. Not dealing with race in a book like this is a massive, glaring blindspot.
Anyway, I liked the idea of this book. I really liked the writing style, which had a very 19th-century boys-adventure-story sort of tone that I thought was true to life and worked very well. A lot of steampunk authors either don't try to do this at all, or can't do it properly. I also really liked the narrator as a character.
But the whole sensibility of the book was dated even when it came out. It came out in 2009 and it was one of those anti-Bush screeds. And, look, I hate Bush, too. But it felt really flat and tedious to be reading a book full of Professional Wrestling-caliber cheap heat. The book felt shallow and it didn't seem to have anything to say.
Also, it completely fell apart at the end. It was a total trainwreck.