Robert Charles Wilson's A Bridge of Years (1991), the best science fiction book I've read in 2006. No idea why it's taken as long as it has for me to get around to former Vancouver & Nanaimo resident RCW's smart, stylish prose; I think that I have always subliminally confused him with mediocre Canadian SF novelist Robert Sawyer, best known for his trilogy about dinosaur astronauts, of which the less said the better.

Bridge is best summarized as James Cameron's Terminator as rewritten by Stephen King and Philip K. Dick. I'm aware of how ridiculous and sound-bitey this sounds, but in this case the description is both accurate and appropriate.

Two representative paragraphs:

1.

"During the hot afternoons Tom achieved a sort of Zen quiescence, as if he was surveying all this bustle from a hot-air balloon. Abstractly, he understood that he needed this job to eat; but he could coast awhile even if he lost it, and there were other jobs. Above all, there was an impossible tunnel hidden behind the sheetrock in his basement; his home was full of gemlike creatures the size of his thumb; his bloodstream carried benign microscopic robots and his TV had begun to talk to him. In the face of which, it was extremely difficult not to smile cheerfully and suggest some alternative ways of disposing of that troublesome '76 Coronet."

2.

"It was hard to navigate coherently. He walked in a daze, blinded by the miraculous. The most prosaic object -- a woman's hat in a milliner's window, a billboard, a chromium hood ornament -- would suddenly capture his attention. They were tokens of the commutation of time, bodies risen from the grave. He could not say which was stranger, his own numbing awareness of the transience of these things or the nonchalance of the people he passed -- people for whom this was merely the present, solid as houses."

I admire Wilson's simple, straightforward prose, and the sympathy with which he treats even his most appalling characters, like the half-man, half-machine soldier from the future, Billy Gargullo, who stalks through the book's latter chapters in his shining power armour: "like cloth, quite golden, rigid only when impacted at high velocity. Bulging here and there with instrumentation, power packs, processing units."
- posted by cjb @ 3:38 PM