On the list of attributes possessed by the Hugo Award- and Nebula Award-winning Robert Charles Wilson, there is one in particular that bears mention: his solid grasp of the zeitgeist. There are two great traditions in speculative fiction – the one featuring wormhole superhighways, alien federations, and obsequious androids, the other a decimated, retrograde, and earthbound humanity recovering from an apocalypse of some sort. Wilson has conjured up a splendid addition to the latter.

In Julian Comstock, the setting is a late-22nd century America, whose redrawn borders now encompass the whole continent. Social organization is semi-feudal, an omnipresent clergy works to eradicate the vestiges of scientific thought from an earlier secular age, and the nation is embroiled in a war of attrition with pan-European forces for control of a thawed Northwest Passage. The eponymous hero, a young exile with illicit interests in evolutionary theory and agnosticism, is conscripted into the army; during his service, his mastery of military strategy makes him a popular leader, but his heresies make him the target of dogmatic and sinister groups.

While sci-fi writers are forever creating cosmetically tweaked versions of this rather familiar alternate-universe America, Wilson surpasses many of his fellows in his use of a narrator named Adam Hazzard, himself a writer and Julian’s admiring friend. In this steam- and coal-driven future, which bears many hallmarks of the 19th century, Hazzard’s literary style is similarly old-fashioned; we get amusingly quaint diction, a prim refusal to share compromising details about the gentler sex, and “Dear reader”-type authorial intrusions. There are many ironies at play here, with Wilson occasionally poking fun at Hazzard’s ignorance and guilelessness, bringing relief from the book’s darker themes: religious zealotry, ecological devastation, and mechanized death.

Offering a balanced amalgam of action and philosophy, Julian Comstock provides vicarious satisfaction to those of us awaiting the end of the world as we know it.