The Chronoliths
This is the first novel I’ve read by Wilson, and I am deeply impressed.
Scott Warden is the book’s protagonist. As the novel begins he’s living a slacker’s beach life in South East Asia with his wife and young daughter. One day he heads off with a dodgy friend to have a look at a mysterious object that arrived overnight in the rainforest. This object is made of unidentifiable matter, is hundreds of feet tall and devastates a wide area around it’s arrival point. At the same moment in time his wife is left stranded as their daughter develops a life threatening ear infection.
Life for Warden is never the same afterward – his wife leaves him, his daughter loses all hearing in one ear and the mysterious object turns out to be a monument commemorating a military victory by some unknown warlord called Kuin 16 years in the future – causing a journalist to dub it a Chronolith.
Over time the world is spun into chaos as more and more of these Chronliths appear, first in South-East Asia (including the destruction of Bangkok) and across the third world. The world economy collapses and political sentiment among the world’s population splits into pro-Kuin and anti-Kuin factions.
The novel is written from Warden’s perspective as he tells the story of how his life unfolds against this despairing backdrop as he is continuously finds himself at the centre of events as they unfold.
This is a really well written book full of complex, fleshed out human beings reacting to horrendous events in the world around them. It’s among the best science fiction I’ve read in years.
I’d recommend it to readers of science fiction hungering for more than cutout characters and who can handle the pretty much unremitting darkness of the novel’s world.