22nd Century Darwinians Challenge the Church in "Julian Comstock"

Peak oil has left the world a churchy, early-industrial shambles in Robert Charles Wilson’s new novel Julian Comstock. An engaging cross between post-apocalyptic series Jericho and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, it may be the best science fiction novel of the year so far.

…Wilson takes his time showing us what has happened over the 150 years between us and his characters, giving us glimpses of how the future has come to regard our lives via government propaganda in film and underground treatises by a French radical named Parmentiere. After peak oil, the world is plunged into a period of massive starvation (factory farms collapse without a steady oil supply), the population of North America is decimated, and a new government finally arises that absorbs Canada into America and rules by succession. The Supreme Court is abolished, indentured servitude reinstated, and the “Dominion Church” is a branch of government used to balance the power of the military.

Julian Comstock is the nephew of the current president, who beheaded Julian’s father for becoming a bit too popular with the people. Now young Julian is hiding out in Saskatchewan, with his trusty guardian Sam, where he befriends the local “lease boy” Adam. (The leasing class rents its land from the “Aristo” class.) They bond over reading: Adam wants nothing more than to be an adventure writer like his idol Mr. Charles Curtis Easton; and Julian has a stash of forbidden science books, including Darwin’s. Julian wants to make a movie about Darwin’s life, to reintroduce science to America’s Dominion-dominated pop culture.

Eventually the two boys are conscripted and swept up into the endless war between America and “Mitteleurope,” which are fighting for control of the now ice-free Northwest Passage that cuts between Northern Canada and Denmark before entering the Arctic. They must dodge bullets, find friends in war-torn Montreal, and escape the murderous plotting of Julian’s uncle.

Eventually Julian is crowned president, and the novel becomes a tale of how he tries to bring his version of justice to America from the presidential palace in New York City.

One of the conceits of the novel is evolution itself – not just the evolutionary theory that Julian wants to re-introduce to the masses, but social evolution. When Julian tries to explain evolution to the incredulous Adam, he describes it as a way that DNA “imperfectly remembers” lifeforms that have come before. Just as the future imperfectly remembers the past. We see this happening again and again in the novel, where people in power twist the past into stories that bolster their own perspective. And others try to unbury alternate versions of that past, to reintroduce old scientific ideas into the gene pool.

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