A Smart Spin On Alternate History In 'The Revolutions'
It's a simple plot, but a sturdy one. With impeccable pacing and momentum, Gilman draws his everyman, Arthur, into a spiral of eye-popping improbability that culminates in an elaborate, poignant picture of a Martian civilization that might have been. Gilman's descriptive powers are as economical as they are vivid, beautifully capturing the spirit of fin de sicle society and literature without grinding it into pastiche. A massive computer powered by both human minds and arcane energy is one of the book's most astounding, unsettling images, as is the grotesquely angelic appearance of the alien race Arthur and his uneasy company of adventurers encounter. And each item in Gilman's grab-bag of wonder comes with symbolic resonance; even the book's title can be read in multiple ways: Philosophical revolutions, astronomical revolutions, and the obvious political kind all overlap as the book's intricate assembly of elements click together like clockwork.
Not everything is so tidy. Gilman introduces seemingly-important plot threads early on — like the death of a duke — only to abandon them. Likewise, Arthur's aspirations as a writer are all but forgotten, with just a brief allusion to his detective character, Cephias Syme, thrown in at the very end. And Gilman frustratingly fails to explore some of the tantalizing themes he sets up; at one point the villainous yet sympathetically complex Lord Podmore seems ready to explore the distinction between the quest for knowledge and the quest for power, but then he drops it as quickly as he picks it up. Worst of all, though, is Arthur and Josephine's colorless relationship, which pales in comparison to the narrative's grand notions and conceptual spectacle.
Luckily, that spectacle makes up for it. For all its big ideas, The Revolutions is by far Gilman's most accessible and lighthearted book. Immersive, playful, and downright fun, it skims along at just the right height, only occasionally going too deep or not deep enough. As the story expands beyond Earth to the moons of Mars, Josephine becomes the central and most riveting character, a woman who endures an otherworldly experience that's as much of an ordeal as it is a cosmic awakening, a transformation that parallels humanity's own painful birth into the 20th century. The Revolutions is an alternate history of Victorian England, but it's also an alternate history of science fiction itself — and of the way we once gazed, and still do, into the future.
Read an excerpt of The Revolutions