Darwinia

By Robert Charles Wilson, 1998

A summary...

At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe suddenly disappeared and is replaced by a wild new continent, with a strange fauna & flora, providing the rest of the world with doubts with what they called « the Miracle ». As Darwin’s theories are suddenly trampled, the continent is called « Darwinia ». People try to find rational explanations while exploring the new continent...

My opinion...

I like the book for the beautiful descriptions and the original idea of suppressing Europe (it makes me think of “Without Warning” of Birmingham who does the same with the US). Even if the final explanation is strange, I found it convincing.

1. The 2nd part of the novel involves a weird explanation. It makes me think of «  Percy Jackson » as « gods » and « demons » suddenly appear and divide the characters into two opposite sides. I was a bit disoriented!

2. The description of the wild fauna & flora is really convincing.

3. Interesting to look at the reaction of people coping with absurd situations. For instance, people tend to rely more on miracles than on science to provide an explanation. The final explanation actually mixed the two.

4. There is a likeliness with adventure novels when a expedition is set to go along the Rhin, which is totally different from the one we know.

5. We really see an evolution of the reaction of countries in this new timeline. Indeed, it spans a almost a hundred years and people resettled in it, not without wars. However, geopolitics is only seen in the eye of characters, but not at a global scale.

Medicis