Julian: A Christmas Story by Robert Charles Wilson

Julian: A Christmas Story by Robert Charles Wilson


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A novella published in one of those impossible numbered hardcovers with a tiny print run. But luckily, the text is also available right here, and I recommend it.

RCW is one of my favorite science fiction authors, full stop. (Well, for his work starting around 2003 – things before that are a bit iffy). This is the story of two seventeen-year-old boys and the draft of Christmas 2172. It turns out I have a narrative kink for science fiction that plausibly turns the future into a social mirror of our past. I bet I can thank Lois McMaster Bujold and Neal Stephenson for that. Wilson's tense, fundamentalist, warring America is a fractured reflection of the nineteenth century, but this is also a highly personal story of two young people on the brink of new lives. And it's Wilson, so the writing soars, more than once.

This is a prequel to a novel, which I have just now procured. Yes, please.

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