This book had an impact on me. It elicited feelings from a deeper place than usual. The only other books to do that recently were Stephen King's Dark Tower series. It is Roland Deschain describing his world in that series which perfectly captures the feeling I got reading Julian Comstock.

The world has moved on.

The world has moved on and I felt sad because Robert Charles Wilson was describing a possible future of my country. I didn't like the glimpse he provided because I can't abide the idea of us slipping so far backwards, although many of the characters in Julian Comstock had no idea the time they live in is a lesser, pale shade of our own. Julian Comstock certainly did and he suffered greatly for it, despite his best efforts to grasp at the shards of our greater civilization lying buried in the ground all around him and put them back together again.

I liked this story despite these feelings, or maybe because of them. It is clear Robert Charles Wilson was going for a strong reaction from his readers and I think he succeeded mightily. The lynchpin on which the story hinges for me is how much of an unreliable and naive narrator Julian's friend and companion Adam Hazzard really is. It is because of his inability to grasp the significance of what is happening around him that really drives the story home and adds greater impact to the events he as the Narrator is relating.

This book is a Hugo nominee, though it did not win. I recommend it highly.