Mysterium (Robert Charles Wilson)
Jan. 20th, 2026 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
js_thrillI am sort of annoyed that this book wasted such a good premise.
Archeologists discover a strange jade-like rock, and it gives off weird radiation, and some folks die. The government hushes it up and takes the rock off to secretly study it in a facility in rural-ish Michigan. One night, the facility where the thing is being studied explodes with light, and the facility, including the nearby town as well as everything else within a sizable but not too sizable radius, has disappeared and been replaced by old growth forest. Of course, we follow the town/facility to wherever it went, which is another world? Dimension? Anyway, it's another earth, whose history is quite a bit different from ours. North America is under a the rule of some sort of Theocratic rule, that government is at war with Spain, and the appearance of this town is a challenge to the government's religious outlook.
WHAT A PREMISE!
And there are moments that attend to interesting details. The town isn't swapped with another town, so it lacks power for some time. It's far away from cities/settlements, and so it takes some time for them to even make contact with locals. But Wilson doesn't wind up doing *doing* anything with this stuff. Characters speculate on what the historical point of divergence is, and idly guess about what major events did or didn't happen in this new universe, but nothing really comes of it. We don't really see the protagonists use their (somewhat superior) technological knowledge much (nor do we see them hampered much by not knowing how the technology they rely on works). We fast forward past some of the more interesting parts of the plot so that we can get to the "action movie heroics" parts of the story.
Can you imagine how good the world-building could have been in a book with this premise? Characters decide to emigrate from this town and try to integrate into this new world, and we don't get any real insight into their mindset or discussion about them other than that they hadn't been from that town and had simply been visiting when the town got ripped into the new world, so they didn't have friends and family in the town. I don't know about any of you, but if I was visiting Peoria, and it got zapped to Percei Omicron VIII, maybe I would decide to stick around Peoria, maybe i would decide to go explore the alien world, but I think there would be a lot to explore in why I made that decision beyond "well, he's not from Peoria." Are they planning to convert? Are they good at following orders from the (brutal) enforcers of Church Law in this government? Do they speak French?
Anyway, I wound up reading this book because after I finished The Last Astronaut, Kobo sent me an email with books I might like, and, in fairness to Kobo, the synopsis was a rock solid recommendation for me. But I think I gave the book a generous 2.5 stars.
Archeologists discover a strange jade-like rock, and it gives off weird radiation, and some folks die. The government hushes it up and takes the rock off to secretly study it in a facility in rural-ish Michigan. One night, the facility where the thing is being studied explodes with light, and the facility, including the nearby town as well as everything else within a sizable but not too sizable radius, has disappeared and been replaced by old growth forest. Of course, we follow the town/facility to wherever it went, which is another world? Dimension? Anyway, it's another earth, whose history is quite a bit different from ours. North America is under a the rule of some sort of Theocratic rule, that government is at war with Spain, and the appearance of this town is a challenge to the government's religious outlook.
WHAT A PREMISE!
And there are moments that attend to interesting details. The town isn't swapped with another town, so it lacks power for some time. It's far away from cities/settlements, and so it takes some time for them to even make contact with locals. But Wilson doesn't wind up doing *doing* anything with this stuff. Characters speculate on what the historical point of divergence is, and idly guess about what major events did or didn't happen in this new universe, but nothing really comes of it. We don't really see the protagonists use their (somewhat superior) technological knowledge much (nor do we see them hampered much by not knowing how the technology they rely on works). We fast forward past some of the more interesting parts of the plot so that we can get to the "action movie heroics" parts of the story.
Can you imagine how good the world-building could have been in a book with this premise? Characters decide to emigrate from this town and try to integrate into this new world, and we don't get any real insight into their mindset or discussion about them other than that they hadn't been from that town and had simply been visiting when the town got ripped into the new world, so they didn't have friends and family in the town. I don't know about any of you, but if I was visiting Peoria, and it got zapped to Percei Omicron VIII, maybe I would decide to stick around Peoria, maybe i would decide to go explore the alien world, but I think there would be a lot to explore in why I made that decision beyond "well, he's not from Peoria." Are they planning to convert? Are they good at following orders from the (brutal) enforcers of Church Law in this government? Do they speak French?
Anyway, I wound up reading this book because after I finished The Last Astronaut, Kobo sent me an email with books I might like, and, in fairness to Kobo, the synopsis was a rock solid recommendation for me. But I think I gave the book a generous 2.5 stars.
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Date: 2026-01-20 11:55 pm (UTC)At that point I would be more worried about my human horn getting harvested.
But yeah, one thing I have certainly learned from book club is how common it is for SF authors to have a cool idea and no story to go with it.