Christmas Miracle! (or Darwinia Book Review)

This is an absolute Miracle which could only have been brought on by divine intervention. My Ipod Mini (or rather, the one I stole from my sister) has miraculously corrected its battery  recharge problem and is now working 100% fine! (which means that the unit will sporatically power down within the first three hours)
. What this means is that I can (and will) take more walks outdoors. I didn't do this before because I can't listen to my podcasts without.


Darwinia is a book by Robert Charles Wilson about a very different 20th Century Earth. In the 1910's, Europe was transformed into a different, yet same continent. The geography is the same, except that in this new Europe (nicknamed Darwinia), Humans never existed and there are fantastical and deadly creatures roaming the land.

The book was good up to about halfway before it just degenerated into poo. The first two parts covered the initial exploration and politics of the new world. (In the 1920's, the Colonies of Britain banded together and tried to domesticate England while America wanted the continent to remain free and boundary-less.) This part was great. The book then jumps decades (to the 1940's) following the main characters and the changing world. The last part follows the final battle in the 1960's. It was the battle between good and evil, etc. It was revealed half way through the book that the whole world existed in a simulation in a thing called the "Archive". Darwinia came from an alien viral infection in the Archive. Both the Virus and the maintainers of the Archive are trying to recruit the characters in the simulation to do their bidding (to win the war by attacking this secret city in Darwinia.)

It has some neat concepts, but I felt that it detracted from the story. Does it really matter that Aliens from another galaxy are trying to corrupt the Archive (at the end of the galaxy in terms of time, when all the stars have faded out and are sucked into the galactic black hole) with information from their own Archive? I mean, it just added another layer of complexity. Also, the concept of a giant simulation is kind of boring and overdone, and I feel that the whole thing would have been better if left unexplained.