Darwinia (novel)
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| Darwinia | |
| Author | Robert Charles Wilson |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Tor Books |
| Publication date | 1998 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 320 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-312-86038-2 |
Darwinia is a 1998 science fiction novel written by Robert Charles Wilson. It won an Aurora Award for Best Long Form in 1999 and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel that same year.
[edit] Plot summary
In March 1912, in the event some people called the "Miracle", Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, including its inhabitants, disappear suddenly overnight, and are replaced with a slice of an alien Earth, a land mass of roughly equal outlines and terrain features, but a strange new flora and fauna which seems to have followed a different path in evolution.
Seen by some as an act of divine retribution, the "Miracle" affects the lives of people all around and transforms world history.
The book describes the life and the adventures of Guilford Law, a young American photographer. As a 14-year-old boy, Guilford Law witnessed the "Miracle" as shimmering lights moving eerily across the ocean sky. As a grown man, he is determined to travel to the strange continent of Darwinia and explore its mysteries. To that end he enlists as a photographer in the Finch expedition, which plans to travel up the river that used to be known as the Rhine and penetrate the bizarre new continent's hidden depths as far as possible. He lands in the middle of the jungle in the midst of nationalistic skirmishes, in which partisans attack and wipe out most of the party of the Finch expedition on the continent which they believe belongs to them.
But things are about to get much stranger. Law has brought an unwanted companion with him, a mysterious twin who seems to have lived--and died--on an alternate Earth unchanged by the Miracle. The twin first appears to Guilford in dreams, and he brings a message that Darwinia is not what it seems to be--and Guilford is not who he seems to be.
A startling revelation soon arrives. By the end of the story, it is revealed to all the characters that it is really now the End of Time, and that the Universe, Earth and all the consciousness that ever existed are really being preserved in a computer-like simulation known as the Archive. The Archive was built by a coalition of all the sentient beings in the Universe in an effort to save consciousness from death. However, "viruses" (parasitic artificial life-forms) known as Psions have arisen in the system of the Archive. Guilford Law eventually learns that he and everything and everyone on Earth are instruments of the cosmic struggle against the Psions for the survival of all consciousness itself.
[edit] Themes
One of the key aspects of the book is how religious ideology has come to bias the sciences in the wake of the Miracle. Many believed the ‘Miracle’ was an act of divine intervention, yet the truth is a lot stranger. The ‘Miracle’ was in fact the effect of a war between the Sentient creators of the Archive, and viral invaders intent on taking the Archive ‘hostage’ so that their algorithms will never die. The Archive was a; “temporal telescope – a recording, a memory,” of every person, every act, every known sentient thought since the start of time. It was the “ultimate history book”, but it could be changed or erased – the effect being a mass genocide of millions of sentient beings, human and not, from across the universe. This discusses how all humans could be connected to a “matrix”; not real but living in a computer simulated world without ever possibly knowing it. This disturbing idea is introduced early in the book, but at the end it is explained through a battle between the Sentient – “god-ridden” men who died in World War I; and the invaders – “demon-ridden” thugs, mainly criminals who had died, showing how two parallel souls were split when the archive was changed.
