Robert Charles Wilson’s 1998 novel Darwinia has been hard-to-find for a while, but is now available in this new (September 2007) edition. Strangely, I just mis-typed the author of this book as Charles Darwin. Charles Wilson is making a career habit of giving his books slightly misleading titles, and this is no exception. Although the “new continent” that appears in place of Old Europe in this novel is ironically named Darwinia by some elements of the press, it’s actually (in terms of landmass and geology) more or less the same as Europe, only with all signs of civilisation (and native flora and fauna) removed.

That’s the premise of this novel: an extraordinary event sees Europe disappear before most of the cataclysmic events of that terrible century, the 20th, have taken place, and the resulting land mass appears to be free for exploration and exploitation by the only world superpower, the USA.

That’s how it’s set up, at least, but of course events intervene and things are not quite what they seem. There are familiar RC Wilson themes here: the technological sublime, religionism, politics, oppression, and the willingness of individuals to make enormous sacrifices for a greater good that they barely understand.

I didn’t enjoy this as much as other RCW books. He’s clearly nagging away here, as in other novels, at similar ideas. (In The Chronoliths, giant monuments to a despotic leader appear from nowhere (apparently from the future); in Spin, an enormous, imposed, technological artefact cuts the Earth off from the rest of the universe; in Darwinia, a whole continent is replaced with another.) What it all adds up to is hard to say, except that individuals are insignificant in the larger scheme of things, which is always a depressing thought (even if it’s all-too-true), and that human nature is, on the whole, pretty shoddy. It is a big downer when you realise, in Darwinia, that having been presented with a whole new continent to play with, human beings immediately set about ripping it apart and stinking the place up.

Still, this is another novel of big ideas, written in RCW’s usual literary style, and like everything else of his, recommended.