Burning Paradise

#1121
Title: Burning Paradise
Author: Robert Charles Wilson
Year: 2013
Publisher: Tom Doherty (Tor)
Pages: 319

As a physical book, nice cover image, nice paper quality, very readable serifed typeface.

I think I've read all of Wilson's published science fiction. I tend to get the book when it becomes available, then save it until I'm ready for a treat. Wilson has never disappointed. Even his thinner works include interesting science and moral or philosophical concerns that show the effects of human decisions on the broader society and culture, as well as on the characters.

This question of what will happen if one road is taken rather than another is central to this story at several levels. Snippets from Frost's "The Road Not Taken" appear in a character's speculations. Through the narrative, characters face difficult choices, as well as concerns about whether their actions are their own or have been manipulated by an alien entity.

A common strategy for Wilson, especially in his earlier work, is to use a Jungian story frame where something alien erupts from the collective unconscious (this, I think, is the quality that gives his speculative fiction an air of horror), interacts with humans or humanity, then disappears. Infrequently, we see the story from the alien's point of view. Usually, though, it's the humans who need to incorporate this eruption/disruption and figure out how and whether it's possible to regain a semblance of normalcy. As a character muses in A Bridge of Years,

It had never occurred to her that people who had shared experiences like this--people who were kidnapped by flying saucers or visited by ghosts--would have to deal with anything as prosaic as dinner. An encounter with the numinous, followed by, say, linguine. (226)

This process parallels the Piagetian choices of accommodation versus assimilation. In the face of new experiences, do we jam our understanding into a concept we already have, or do we shift paradigms? Wilson's characters typically need to shift their understanding of the world to include these previously unconscious phenomena and their effects on the characters' human reality. In Burning Paradise, Wilson plays with this tension as characters struggle to figure out which plausible story is most likely to be true, as well as what to do about it.

This conflict affects how characters see each other and their assumptions about who belongs in what group(s) with whom. As in Darwinia, which this novel mirrors and distorts, there are two sets of alien assertions about what is happening and what the humans should do. In Darwinia, it's easier to determine which alien project is "good." It's a lot harder here.

As in most of Wilson's work, some protagonists must make decisions that include both local effects (such as endangering or saving their family and friends) and societal ones (often, as here, related to humanity's free will). As elsewhere in some of his recent work, Wilson's aliens are portrayed in contrast to this. They are group entities, loyal to their collective goals but egoless and without loyalty or commitment to smaller groups or themselves as individuals, except insofar as they are necessary units in the collective. While Star Trek's Borg come to mind, I think Ender's Hive Queen is more to the point (and there may be a nod to Card here--the character Ethan Iverson's treatise on the aliens, The Fisherman and the Spider, immediately evokes Ender's similarly-titled The Hive Queen and The Hegemon also focused on an archetypal alien and human).

As is a frequent trope in Wilson's novels, a male character expresses a wish to be allowed and helped to die. In this case, it's not because he wants to get out of the action, but because it's time. This is a subtle difference, but may speak to the maturation of this recurrent element.

Structurally, I'd have wished for a little more time and unfolding of ideas in the last fifth of the book. I found myself pulled along by the urgency of the climactic events, but they weren't as satisfying to read as they might have been with a little more preparation, since I had to go back after finishing to work out some of the motives and reasons that compelled the action. Wilson refuses the reader a happy ending in that the moral ambiguities and difficult choices made by the characters are not easily settled on either a personal or societal level. Choices are not clean, and we live with the consequences. That's not a cowboys-in-space ending, but a realistic one.

This works well as an alternate history. The differences are usually subtle but matter-of-fact. Since our world is closer to one of the potential outcomes of the characters' actions, it's a fun comparison. 

Not Wilson's best, but I'm not sure he has a worst. A fine novel with an interesting premise, brought to a satisfyingly troubling and ambivalent conclusion.

Fun fact: Searching online for the quote above (which I didn't find and had to resort to skimming the book), I did learn that numinous and linguini both have eight letters. Does it mean anything? You tell me.