In the Year 2174, the US Flag Will Have 60 Stars: A Review of Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America by Robert Charles Wilson

                                                                                                                           

                                                               

By Don Curren 

In the year 2174, the US flag will have 60 stars.

The US will control most of what was once Canada, although it will be at war with European invaders trying to establish an enclave in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Presidency will be hereditary, not elected. Frequently, though, the succession will be decided by coup d’etat.

New York will have replaced Washington as the capital. Central Park will become a walled enclave enclosing the Executive Palace where the President lives, protected by the crack troops of the Republican Guard.

The president will vie for power with a Senate representing the interests of a powerful aristocratic class, as well as an extremely powerful ecclesiastical organization called The Dominion.

The Dominion oversees all Christian denominations, exercises an almost theocratic control over public morals and enforces rigid control over the intellectual life of the republic, suppressing knowledge of past scientific accomplishments such as Darwinism.

The economy will be a kind of oligarchy, where the hereditary aristocracy, known as “Aristos” or Eupatridians,” rules over an indentured middle class and a working class that’s essentially enslaved.

Perhaps most shockingly, technology will have reverted to a 19^th century level after the collapse of fossil fuels, with electricity only sparsely available and humans relying on steam, wind, and horses for transportation.

That’s the bleak vision of the 22^nd Century in North America outlined in the 2009 novel Julian Comstock: A Story of 22^nd Century America by the science fiction novelist Robert Charles Wilson.

But Wilson nonetheless manages to make Julian Comstock an engaging and entertaining read.

I find myself tempted to use the adjective “fun” to describe it, although that might have a dismissive connotation that wouldn’t fit this thought-provoking book.

Before I get any deeper into the book itself, a little bit of back story on Robert Charles Wilson and what lead me to him.

A few years back, I realized that my personal vision  of science fiction was essentially frozen in about the 70s.

I had grown up reading the “greats” of the first few decades of mature science fiction – Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, etc. – as well as many of the lesser lights.

In my late teens I discovered Philip K Dick, and I pretty much mentally moved into his utterly distinctive and darkly fascinating universe.

(Since then, the rest of the world has caught up. There are times when the Trump era seems indistinguishable from one of Dick’s early, ‘50s novels about shabby dictatorships in the future US)

 In some ways, I’ve lived there ever since, at least in terms of my reading patterns in speculative fiction, reading and re-reading his better novels and short stories, with occasional visits to his underrated UK counterpart, Ian Watson.

I was like the many people whose musical taste is arrested in late adolescence, and who keep listening to the same bands and the same songs for the rest of their life.

It became clear to me in the early 2020s, though, that I was missing out on a lot of interesting reading.

So, I started exploring some of the SF writers who had emerged more recently.

Some of them – Joe Haldeman, Dan Simmons, Kim Stanley Robinson and others - offered recognizable extensions (and variations) of science fiction as I had come to understand it.

Others – Octavia Butler, NK Jemsin, Liu Cixin - brought entirely new voices and sensibilities to the table.

Somewhere in those years, I latched onto Robert Charles Wilson, and he quickly became one of my favorites.

Wilson was born in California in 1953 but grew up in the Toronto area.

 Apart from some stints in British Columbia, and a short period in the early 1970s in Whittier, California, he has lived most of his life in the Greater Toronto Area. In 2007 he became a Canadian citizen, according to Wikipedia.

It was his Canadian-ness that first attracted me to Wilson. But the boundary-transcending quality of his work quickly became obvious, and I was pulled deep into his oeuvre.

I’ve read roughly half of his published output, and I’d have to say Wilson maintains extremely high standards.

His books tend to be riveting. They have the kind of page-turning momentum that good thrillers do.

He’s a superb craftsman, fashioning characters who are realistic, complex and sometimes very flawed. Around those characters he constructs plots that are complex and fast-moving.

Wilson, along with some of his contemporaries such as fellow Canadian Robert Sawyer, represent, for me, a kind of professionalization and consolidation of earlier science fiction.

Their plots and characters are well-crafted, and work with great efficiency to draw the reader in, although the visionary intensity of earlier sci-fi seems, at times, to be missing.

But Wilson’s  best work – the Spin trilogy and perhaps Burning Paradise, among the ones that I’ve read – achieve the ambition and intellectual depth of the classics of the genre.

I’m not the only one who has a high opinion of Wilson: Stephen King has named him "probably the finest science-fiction author now writing" and called him “a hell of a storyteller.”

I found Julian Comstock: A Tale of 22^nd Century, which was nominated for a Hugo award in 2010, in a used bookstore a year or so ago. For a while I balked at reading it, as it seemed long and a little peculiar.

But I finally broke down and cracked it open a few weeks ago and was instantly drawn into the world of Julian Comstock.

The summary above makes the book sound like yet another grim dystopia about America’s future. But there’s a lightness to the book, a feeling of youthful aspiration and adventure that offsets some of the darkness.

Wilson achieves that by giving the book a first-person narrator who’s sincere, good-natured and likable, albeit naïve and inexperienced.

He’s not Julian Comstock, the complex, troubled character who gives his name to the book, and whose life and times define it.

Comstock is a member of the aristocracy whose war-hero father was murdered by his uncle, the current president.

After a brief but “heroic” career in the army, Comstock, an ambitious and well-educated intellectual, arises to the presidency with the support of the military.

He has a brief, turbulent reign as president before dying of one of the many epidemic diseases that periodically sweep through the unprotected population.

Wilson gives us Comstock’s life as narrated by his close friend and companion Adam Hazzard.

Hazzard is the Watson to Comstock’s Holmes, or the Boswell to his Samuel Johson.

His jejune perspective makes the  novel’s bleak landscape of conflict and betrayal easier to assimilate, and more human and relatable than it might be if told from another perspective.

The downside of Wilson’s use of first-person is that some of the more intriguing details in the future history that he builds aren’t explored in any detail.

There’s no exposition about how the US absorbed Canada.

Quite a bit of the novel takes place in what was formerly Quebec. Although there are French-speaking characters and some references to the area’s Francophone culture, there’s no discussion of how it was integrated into the US, and how Quebec’s separatist impulses were quelled.

Nor is there any specific discussion about how climate change unfolded, and the role it played in the social and technological retreat depicted.

It’s obvious, though, that climate change has had an impact.

Adam Hazzard grows up in an area called “Athabasca,” which seems to be in what is now northern British Columbia or Alberta. He describes the summers there as long and hot.

Manhattan is described as laced with canals where streets once were.

But the societal and technological collapse that befell 21^st Century civilization – called the “False Tribulation” in the 22^nd Century – seems to have been driven by the end of easy fossil fuel availability more than climate change.

That might reflect the fact that Wilson was writing in the early 2000s, when oil prices were reaching record highs and theories about peak oil were circulating.

Overall, Wilson’s vision of the future of America seems prescient. Except, perhaps, that the slide toward oligarchy, theocracy and an anti-science ideology seems to be unfolding more rapidly than he depicts, and without extra stimulus of declining energy resources.

If the America of the 20^th Century envisioned by Wilson seems to echo Imperial Rome at times, that’s not a coincidence.

Wilson’s novel is said by Wikipedia to have been influenced by the story of Julian the Apostate, who ruled the Roman Empire briefly in the 360s, and whose story was also recounted in Gore Vidal’s 1964 novel Julian.

But I don’t believe Wilson was fashioning his vision of the future of America just to serve as a backdrop to his reimagined version of that piece of Roman history.

The 22^nd Century America Wilson depicts represents an extrapolation of trends implicit in contemporary America.

Wilson may be trying to make that explicit by weaving an English political philosopher named Arwal Parmentier into his fictional world and then quoting one of Parmentier’s books: “The ascent of the Aristocracy should not be understood solely as a response to the exhaustion of oil, platinum, iridium and other resources of the Technological Efflorescence. The trend to oligarchy predated that crisis and contributed to it.”

Julian Comstock abounds with interesting ideas, some of them extending to topics beyond the possible future of America and into reflections on the nature of journalism, storytelling, literature and the other arts.

His vision of the future is so interesting, and so salient to our current situation, that I wish the world-building in Julian Comstock was more explicit.

The practice in science fiction of building a world and then writing sequels and prequels and whole series set in it often seems exploitative, an ill-considered (ab)use of intellectual property with diminishing literary returns.

But I wish Wilson would revisit the universe of Julian Comstock and explore some of the aspects of its future history that are neglected in the book – in particular, the sixty stars on the US flag and how they got there.

It’s one prediction of his that I don’t believe will ever come true.

At least, I hope most sincerely that it doesn’t.