We went to a Worldcon panel called "The Singularity: Are We Getting Any Closer?" featuring Farthing author Jo Walton and Julian Comstock/Spin author Robert Charles Wilson. They talked a lot about the pitfalls and plausibility of the Singularity, the idea that a drastic change in technology will result in a world we can barely visualize, full of sentient machines and vastly improved longevity, among other things.

Many people seem to think the Singularity is inevitable, noted Walton, but the panel was aimed at questioning whether we're any closer to it now than when Vernor Vinge pioneered it in his 1986 novel Marooned In Realtime.

For her part, Walton argues the Singularity is an interesting concept for science-fiction storytelling, but "it isn't going to happen. It's a completely mistaken concept [and] we've made no real progress towards it." The idea is based on a false extrapolation, similar to saying that since we could go 30 MPH 100 years ago, and 400 MPH 50 years ago, now we should be traveling at the speed of light.

And because people believe the Singularity is inevitable, some argue that you can't write about the future at all — since we can't imagine life after the Singularity, it's almost impossible to write about. Walton worries that this idea is the "turd in the punchbowl" of future-set science fiction.

Adds Walton: "To be fair, Vinge has written some excellent fiction within that constraint [of assuming the Singularity happens in 20 years], in the same way people write sonnets — but a sonnet is not the only poem you would want to write."

Wilson pointed out that if the Singularity really is coming, then it's inevitable — so there's no need for people to be cheerleaders for it. He compared it to "telepathy or dianetics," science-fictional ideas which some people adopted "with religious fervor." A core question in science fiction is "where is our technology going, and what can we do with it," noted Wilson. "The Singularity is just one answer."

Panelist Christopher Carson pointed out that the science fiction section in bookstores lately consists of nothing but "transhuman science fiction or urban fantasy." People tend to see the Singularity coming partly because devices are becoming more complicated — but that's often an example of "feature creep," like the fact that your cellphone now has a host of functions you don't understand and didn't ask for. That's not really a sign of progress, because those extra functions were designed by some marketing person somewhere, he pointed out.

The Singularity is notoriously hard to define, but people often say that you could bring Socrates forward in time and take him to Worldcon, and he would understand what it was about, more or less. But you couldn't take a goldfish to Worldcon and have it understand what was going on. A present-day human, visiting a post-Singularity world, would be more like that goldfish than Socrates.

But Walton says this is a loaded example, because Socrates is an extraordinary example. A "random Greek person" from Socrates' era might have a much harder time understanding Worldcon.

"The question I sometimes ask myself is, How would the Singularity work in Darfur?" says Wilson.

And there was lots of talk about the potential downsides of getting the Internet in your head, complete with phishing, spam, malware and bad memes. Says Walton, the first 100,000 people who get the Internet in their heads, without any terrible, life-ending mishaps, will have a really hard time upgrading later on. "Imagine an outdated computer in your head."

The Enchantment Emporium, Tanya Huff (DAW)

In this urban fantasy, Allie Gale's grandma disappears, leaving behind a strange shop that sells magical supplies to the local witch population. When Allie takes it over, she's suddenly involved in a mysterious struggle within the Canadian magic community. If you ever wanted to speculate about the witch population of modern Toronto, this is your book.

Naamah's Kiss, Jacqueline Carey (Grand Central Publishing)

From the io9 review:

This is a novel of pure adventure, with a kick ass heroine who gets to fight, do magic, and get laid just like the swashbuckling heroes of old. It's a perfect beach read. And the best part is the Jacqueline Carey is extremely clever – don't let her fool you with all that romantic frippery. She manages to slip a lot of interesting, subversive messages into this swords-and-sorcery tale.

The Women of Nell Gwynne's, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

The women of a Victorian brothel are hired to cater to the needs of a party of businessmen holding an auction for a mysterious piece. They find themselves quickly involved in intrigue and espionage, in a story with flecks of steampunk and classic mystery. We reviewed it (along with a couple of other Baker books) here.

Wild Thyme, Green Magic, Jack Vance (Subterranean)

This career-spanning collection of stories from Jack Vance includes a wide variety of genres, including a few science fiction stories about other worlds. Vance's ability to build worlds has been praised by Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson and Robert Silverberg.

Fragment, Warren Fahy (Delacorte)

A reality show crew on a ship stumble on an island ecosystem inhabited by parallel-evolved monsters. From the io9 review:

If you like monsters and mad science - and who doesn't? - this is the perfect book to take on your vacation or on that long plane ride to a remote island. However, if you're looking for characters who move outside of two dimensions, you might want to give this one a pass.

The Year's Best Science Fiction 26, edited by Gardner Dozois (Griffin)

I'm a sucker for well-complied science fiction anthologies, and this one appears to be no exception. Including 30 stories from masters and new writers alike, this collection also has an extended list of honorable mentions. It looks like a pretty hefty resource for the short story geek.

Green, Jay Lake (Tor)

A fantasy / steampunky tale of international espionage and mythology. From the io9 review:

At times unsettling but always compelling, Green abounds with intrigue and adventure. A feminist fable lovingly written with a father's hope and concern for his daughter's future, Green is the story of a strong-willed young woman trying to find her place in a world that would rather ignore her. Green will not be ignored.

A Monster's Notes, Laurie Sheck (Knopf)

This novel turns inside out one of the oldest science fiction stories. The story imagines Frankenstein's monster not as Mary Shelley's creation, but as her companion, consoling her in a time of sorrow. He discusses with her all of the facets of humanity, trying to understand human connection in a world where he doesn't belong. It's a tale of speculative alternate history, couched in a story of compassion and companionship.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles WIlson (Tor)

A speculative future of post-oil America. From the io9 review:

Peak oil has left the world a churchy, early-industrial shambles in Robert Charles Wilson's new novel Julian Comstock. An engaging cross between post-apocalyptic series Jericho and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, it may be the best science fiction novel of the year so far.

Haze, L.E. Modesitt Jr. (Tor)

An agent of the now-Chinese-run Earth investigates a planet surrounded by a haze of nano-satellites. He finds an eerily familiar world of superior technology.

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (Ace)

This book came out a little while back in the rest of the world, but this month marks its publication in the United States. It's a space opera of post-humanity and colonization, with the added twist of relativistic travel. As a result, this novel chronicles a mystery distorted by time. It's certainly nice to see a space epic that explores some of the complexity of actual interstellar travel. We reviewed it here.

The Strain, Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan (William Morrow)

Master of Horror Guillermo del Toro brings vampires back from their whiney post-Buffy image. From the io9 review:

The Strain is a breakneck thrill ride chronicling only the first four days of the vampire plague that may destroy civilization. The cinematic quality really comes though, making the book feel more like a action blockbuster than a thought-provoking horror novel.

The novel is about a world where fundamentalist Christianity controls North America, war rages on the Arctic frontier, and an unlikely hero tries to reignite his country's believe in evolution. That hero is Julian Comstock, and his story is told by a lifelong best friend named Adam Hazzard. Ultimately Julian gets a chance to have a tremendous impact upon the world, and he uses his power to make a swashbuckling, silent movie about the romanticized adventures of Charles Darwin. You can read our review of the novel here.

Wilson is the author of several other novels, including the award-winning Spin. We chatted with him via e-mail.

io9: One of the delightful things about your novel is the narrator, Adam Hazzard. You've said other places that you took inspiration from 19th century adventure novels for Adam's voice. Are there any ways that you think Adams language or point of view diverges strongly from its 19th century influences? What concerns or verbal tics did you try to give him to mark him as a 22nd century man, rather than a 19th century one?

RCW: When you read those old American adventure novels you can't help feeling the gap between then and now. Their assumptions about sex, race, patriotism and religion are often jarring, sometimes funny, occasionally bizarre, and always revealing. So how would the folks who wrote and read those books see us?

What Adam Hazzard gives us is an approximation of that impossible dialogue. He's the product of a culture that looks like 19th-century America, but he can glimpse our world in the rear-view mirror. I hope that what he misunderstands or misinterprets speaks volumes about his time and about ours.

I suppose what marks Adam as a 22nd-century voice is that he consistently sees our world as wasteful, a time when great and irreplaceable wealth was recklessly and thoughtlessly spent. And I expect there's some truth in that.

io9: Adam is constantly reminding us that he's writing a story for public consumption where some things are exaggerated and some things are clearly being left out. I felt like this was particularly obvious when it came to the topic of Julian's homosexuality. Although Adam is fairly open about many kinds of radicalism and unconventional ideas that he encounters, he steadfastly refuses to believe – or maybe to admit – that Julian is gay. What made you decide to do that?

RCW: I don't want to get into spoilers here, but I would suggest that Adam does ultimately accept Julian's homosexuality, if you read the text closely. (I guess you could say he accepts it without explicitly acknowledging it.) Adam is timid about discussing sexuality of any kind: the closest he gets to detailing his own sexuality is his admission that he and his future wife Calyxa "anticipated our vows," and you can practically hear him blushing as he says it.

He does live in an officially homophobic society, and he does have to be a little careful of what he says. At the same time, the story makes it clear that the official homophobia isn't universally shared. There's a lively gay subculture that Adam glimpses more or less out of the corner of his eye.

And while Julian's homosexuality is only dimly visible to Adam, he's never judgmental about it. The counter-example in the book is Deacon Hollingshead, who is in such single-minded denial about his daughter's lesbianism that he tortures her lovers in attempt to discover some kind of gay conspiracy aimed at his family. And Adam's sympathy is all with the Deacon's daughter.

io9: I think this may be the only novel I've ever read where the swashbuckling futuristic hero is from Saskatchewan. (As somebody who has spent a lot of time in Saskatchewan, I was pleased.) In fact it seems as if you're trying to create a future where all of North America is like Saskatchewan today: largely unpopulated and rural. Is that what you were imagining?

RCW: A radically depleted population has made the continent seem much larger, and global warming has made what Adam calls "the boreal West" a more inviting place to live. But the world of Julian Comstock is far from entirely rural, and its cities are vibrant cultural centers.

io9: A lot of this novel deals with silent movies – watching them and making them. What movies were you watching as you wrote this novel? And has anyone subsequently approached you about making a musical action movie about Darwin?

RCW: The movies are part of that vigorous, crude urban culture. I do love watching silent movies when I have the opportunity, for the same reason I love reading obscure 19th-century novels: in the absence of a working time machine, it's as close as we can get to dropping in for a visit. One of the films I came across as I was writing Julian Comstock was D.W. Griffith's In Old California (1910). Like the pernicious Birth of a Nation, In Old California is nostalgic for an imagined past of wealthy aristocratic landowners presiding over fields worked by contented serfs. The "eupatridians" of Julian Comstock would approve, no doubt.

As for a musical action movie about Darwin...um, no, I haven't been approached. But if anyone wants to film Julian Comstock, that movie-within-a-movie might make an interesting set-piece.

io9: There is a strand of contemporary science fiction that deals with the idea of a post singularity society, a future so transformed by technology that we can't recognize it. But the future in Julian Comstock looks more like the 19th century than a post-singular noosphere or cyber-whatever. Would you consider Julian Comstock to be kind of an anti-singularity fiction?

RCW: I didn't have the singularity in mind when I was writing Julian Comstock, though I'll confess I don't believe in it. Extrapolating curves to the asymptotic just doesn't seem realistic. I think it was Damon Knight who characterized this kind of extrapolation back in the 1960s: if commemorative postage stamps continue to grow larger at their current rate, they'll cover entire continents by the year 2000.

That doesn't mean science fiction writers shouldn't write about the singularity. Futurists toss out these possibilities; we play with them. And in the course of play the premises are explored, challenged, expanded, sometimes exploded. I've written stories set in prosperous, post-scarcity futures. That doesn't seem too likely at the moment; but the future is intrinsically unpredictable; that's why it's fascinating. We would impoverish the genre if we limited ourselves to mere likelihoods.

io9: Many of your books have dealt with time travel or time warping or temporal mash-ups in some way. I think the temporal juxtaposition of past and future in Julian Comstock could make it a time travel novel too. What appeals to you about messing around with time?

RCW: I like to say that science fiction de-privileges the present. Past, present, future — those aren't fixed categories; they're points of view. It was the French composer Nadia Boulanger who said, "In art there are no generations, only individuals; all times have been modern." Not just in art, I would add. The quaintness of the past and the marvelousness of the future are entirely in the eye of the beholder. Messing around with time in fiction is one way we remind ourselves of that truth. Science fiction does it more consciously and consistently than any other genre, and that's one of the things I love about it.

Wilson has won the Hugo award, and written half a dozen other novels, but has yet to achieve a great deal of name recognition among SF readers. I think Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America is likely to change that. Ostensibly a tale of the brave wartime deeds and eventual presidency of Julian Comstock, written by his close friend Adam Hazzard, the novel is far more than that. It's a sprawling, gorgeous meditation on the inexplicable ways that history mutates culture, from its religious institutions to its pop culture.

It's also a fine example of world building. Wilson takes his time showing us what has happened over the 150 years between us and his characters, giving us glimpses of how the future has come to regard our lives via government propaganda in film and underground treatises by a French radical named Parmentiere. After peak oil, the world is plunged into a period of massive starvation (factory farms collapse without a steady oil supply), the population of North America is decimated, and a new government finally arises that absorbs Canada into America and rules by succession. The Supreme Court is abolished, indentured servitude reinstated, and the "Dominion Church" is a branch of government used to balance the power of the military.

Julian Comstock is the nephew of the current president, who beheaded Julian's father for becoming a bit too popular with the people. Now young Julian is hiding out in Saskatchewan, with his trusty guardian Sam, where he befriends the local "lease boy" Adam. (The leasing class rents its land from the "Aristo" class.) They bond over reading: Adam wants nothing more than to be an adventure writer like his idol Mr. Charles Curtis Easton; and Julian has a stash of forbidden science books, including Darwin's. Julian wants to make a movie about Darwin's life, to reintroduce science to America's Dominion-dominated pop culture.

Eventually the two boys are conscripted and swept up into the endless war between America and "Mitteleurope," which are fighting for control of the now ice-free Northwest Passage that cuts between Northern Canada and Denmark before entering the Arctic. They must dodge bullets, find friends in war-torn Montreal, and escape the murderous plotting of Julian's uncle.

After much tribulation, Julian is crowned president, and the novel becomes a tale of how he tries to bring his version of justice to America from the presidential palace in New York City.

One of the conceits of the novel is evolution itself - not just the evolutionary theory that Julian wants to re-introduce to the masses, but social evolution. When Julian tries to explain evolution to the incredulous Adam, he describes it as a way that DNA "imperfectly remembers" lifeforms that have come before. Just as the future imperfectly remembers the past. We see this happening again and again in the novel, where people in power twist the past into stories that bolster their own perspective. And others try to unbury alternate versions of that past, to reintroduce old scientific ideas into the gene pool.

And at a key moment, Julian reminds us of exactly what's at stake in this evolution metaphor. He's explaining to Adam why he loves people of the past, but also hates them. How could he hate them? Adam wonders. "Because they evolved into us," Julian says. Indeed, the culture of brutal church leaders and illiterate servants we see in Julian Comstock is all too plausible as an outcome of our present.

It's impossible to do justice to the gentle humor and cleverness of Wilson's prose in a review: Suffice to say that he manages to capture a nineteenth century flavor without falling into off-putting artifice. This is one of those rare science fiction novels whose prose style is as energetic and finely-tuned as its ideas. For some readers, the odd turns of phrase and footnotes may be wearing. But it's crucial for Wilson's world-building project, where he's exploring what happens to American life in a world whose cultural elite consider the nineteenth century the height of civilization.

There are a few problems with the novel, such as the selective credulousness that Wilson assigns to his narrator Adam. We know that Adam is clever enough to see through political scheming, and open-minded enough to accept the heretical scientific ideas of his friend Julian as well as his radical, Parmentierist wife Calyxa. But even when Julian goes to gay bars, and eventually takes a male lover, Adam stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that his friend is gay. Though played as humorous naivete, Adam's peculiar blindness comes across as a general narrative squeamishness that seems out of place in a book that confronts so many other thorny issues head-on.

But you can mark this squeamishness up to stylistic choice, and certainly we're never in doubt that our hero is both a brave war hero and a homosexual.

Not only has fictional author Adam Hazzard written a brave book about an unconventional radical who challenges the powers-that-be in his world, but Robert Charles Wilson has written a brave book too. For Julian's issues are our issues. The church tries to control our pop culture and politics; and disempowered, semi-literate people are sent by our governments to fight wars over resources they'll never be able to access. Our media are far more mesmerized by the fashions of the aristocracy than by scientific discovery.

Julian Comstock reminds us that inevitably, every generation imperfectly remembers the past. The best we can hope for is that the future will remember the constructive ideas we've left behind rather than the unhelpful ones. This novel is about why the struggle over cultural memory may be the most important of all.

You can pre-order Julian Comstock via Amazon - it will hit bookstores next month.