Robert Charles Wilson (1) (1953–)

This novel starts out with an uncanny event that transforms the world. One night in 1912, a giant circular patch of the Earth, roughly Europe and a bit of North Africa, goes silent. Arriving ships find that all the people and every trace of their works have vanished. The general topography of the land is the same, but its flora and fauna are nothing that have ever been seen in the planet's history - yet nonetheless betray an evolutionary history just as long as the one we know.

The history of the world proceeds differently. No 1914-1918 Great War, slower technological progress, the US the sole world superpower, and a revival of creationist explanations of the origin of Earth and life follow the apparent miracle. In 1920, Guilford Law and his wife and child travel to England, which is being resettled by the remains of the British Empire. He will join an American scientific expedition into the interior of the land now called Darwinia. But Guilford is haunted by dreams of another life, one that ended in a war that his history and his memory say never occurred. Other men around the world are likewise haunted, by dreams or, for certain men without conscience, by terrible phantoms they think of as gods - evil gods with real-world powers.

Wilson loves setting ordinary human relationships against a backdrop of cosmic scale, and Darwinia eventually becomes cosmic indeed - this 1998 release is a very 1990s SF novel. Not Wilson's best, but quite satisfying.… (mer)