Book review: Wilson's 'Julian Comstock'

Review of Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

By Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson’s post peak-oil, post-technological collapse America is a vastly different nation from the one his readers know: ruled by a president elected by acclimation, it is a nation where class system is in effect, slavery is legal and Senate seats are hereditary.
The Supreme Court has been replaced by the Dominion, a fundamentalist Christian superchurch that wields enormous political power. The Constitution has been altered, too — Americans now have the right to worship in any church, as long as that church has been certified by the Dominion; and they have the right to approved speech. These and other laughable rights form the book’s sometime biting political subtext.

Besides the retreat from reason, the world of Wilson’s America has retreated technologically. It’s the 19th century all over again: carriages and horses and railroads rule transportation. Steam power rules, though this book is not steampunk. And some major technologies are inexplicably missing from this neo-Victorian world as well. It seems, for instance, that nuclear weapons have been mysteriously forgotten by the belligerent powers, a development that strains suspension of disbelief.

Of course, Julian Comstock is not a novel that focuses on technology or the collapse of a technological civilization. Rather, it is a book concerned with the politics of the future. And the future that Julian Comstock wants for America is very much like the past — a world without the meddlesome Dominion. Julian hates the Dominion because it suppresses knowledge, but does it really? Or is the Dominion merely a tool of other interests? Who benefits from a nation of semi-literate people who are taught to believe that evolution and the DNA are a myth, the moon landing was a hoax and that the collapse of civilization was God’s punishment for the sinful lives of the seculars? Sadly, we never find out, for the narrator is too naive to bother exploring those themes.

One of the great aspects of this book and others by Wilson is the world building. Wilson’s portrayal of a world scarred by social, technological and environmental change is organic: The characters, places and events emerge naturally out of vast social and environmental changes that could happen if the oil era were ever to end. And his writing is masterful, superbly capturing the flavor of his neo-Victorian world.

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