Burning Paradise

Written by Robert Charles Wilson

Narrated by Scott Brick

From Robert Charles Wilson, the author of the Hugo-winning Spin, comes Burning Paradise, a new tale of humans coming to grips with a universe of implacable strangeness.
Cassie Klyne, nineteen years old, lives in the United States in the year 2015—but it's not our United States, and it's not our 2015.

Cassie's world has been at peace since the Great Armistice of 1918. There was no World War II, no Great Depression. Poverty is declining, prosperity is increasing everywhere; social instability is rare. But Cassie knows the world isn't what it seems. Her parents were part of a group who gradually discovered the awful truth: that for decades—back to the dawn of radio communications—human progress has been interfered with, made more peaceful and benign, by an extraterrestrial entity. That by interfering with our communications, this entity has tweaked history in massive and subtle ways. That humanity is, for purposes unknown, being farmed.

Cassie's parents were killed for this knowledge, along with most of the other members of their group. Since then, the survivors have scattered and gone into hiding. Cassie and her younger brother Thomas now live with her aunt Nerissa, who shares these dangerous secrets. Others live nearby. For eight years they have attempted to lead unexceptional lives in order to escape detection. The tactic has worked.

Until now. Because the killers are back. And they're not human.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Nov 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781427232250

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson was born in California and lives in Toronto. His novel Spin won science fiction’s Hugo Award in 2006. Earlier, he won the Philip K. Dick Award for his debut novel A Hidden Place; Canada’s Aurora Award for Darwinia; and the John W. Campbell Award for The Chronoliths.

Reviews for Burning Paradise

[bezoar44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Burning Paradise reads as a sort of cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a Robert Ludlum thriller - shallow plot, constant action, and a high body count. It falls into a sub-genre of scientific horror - in contrast to metaphysical horror, in which eldritch or occult forces threaten to destroy the main characters, here it is the Darwinian, implacable universe, against which human dreams and feelings are meaningless. Relatively early in the book, one character muses: "there was no intelligence in evolution, only the cutting board logic of selective reproduction.... What was is Charles Darwin had said? 'From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved...There is grandeur in this view of life'. Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept."[121] In this book, evolution creates a kind of existential horror.Unfortunately, while it offers plenty of tension, the book has several frustrating shortcomings. [SPOILERS FOLLOW]. For one thing, the major driver of the plot is a struggle between one alien hive-mind and another; in retrospect, it's not clear why that struggle has to involve the main characters at all. Second, the author's decision to have Thomas turn out to be a sim doesn't fit with the rules laid down previously in the story. The twist is effective and devastating -- prior to that point, he is cast as the only really innocent character, and a main reason for the other protagonists to keep pushing forwards. But the story assumes that human-born sims are rare (only 200 to 300 in the world), and randomly distributed, making it extremely unlikely that both Leo and Thomas could be sims. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the story presents the aliens as sentient but not self-conscious. This is a central conceit of the story - that humans are like self-aware fishermen catching fish, while the aliens simply very sophisticated hive-mind spiders, spinning webs of social manipulation by instinct. Even in fiction, there's a certain point where this fails an alien Turing test. If an alien can fake human emotional and social responses to the extent that no one -- even a brother or lover -- can tell, why do the characters assert over and over again that it isn't conscious? Wilson must be fully aware of this problem - he drops in a sly reference to Alan Turing as one of the first academics to grasp the presence of the hive-mind. Nonetheless, the book assumes the hive-mind is not conscious, and uses that assumption as a key element to justify the human characters' revulsion towards the aliens. There is in fact a difference between a universe that is unsettling because it operates without a telos, and an organism that operates with consciousness, but this book mashes them together. One key character in this book, Nerissa Iverson, shares a name with a main character from another of Robert Charles Wilson's book's, Blind Lake (which I haven't read). She seems to represent a romantic worldview - she draws her inspiration from literature, always able to pull a relevant quotation from a classic work - the quote above, on the grandeur/horror of evolution, is hers. On one level, the story contrasts the scientific and romantic views of the world and suggests they are doomed to break up. Ethan, the 'man of science', is willing to recognize the Darwinian inhumanity of the universe and face it head on; Nerissa, who would have preferred not to have to face cold reality, ultimately blames the scientist for shattering the illusion that there were parts of life (her family) the universe couldn't destroy. Cassie's new love is probably supposed to be the ultimate counterweight, but it is still an exceedingly bleak view of the world, unleavened by the possibility of cosmic or personal grace.

[John W Bjerk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A creepy sci-fi book.

Kind of hindered by everyone being confident of the main creepy thing and talking about it before they had a way to know it.

[socprof9740 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As a long-time fan of RCW, this was a major disappointment. The story is one-dimensional and there are no big surprises. None of the characters were exactly interesting. This whole thing was just bland.

[james_patrick_joyce · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

To this date, I have never not enjoyed a novel by Robert Charles Wilson. This one included.

Adventure, science-based theorizing turned into (in this case horrific) reality. This is an alternate history Earth. One where, in the late 1800s when humanity first began exploring radio, we found an atmospheric layer (near the outer extreme of the atmosphere) which propagates radio-waves, thus facilitating global communications. Some technologies move faster than in our reality, some slower. By default, all transmissions are routed through this layer.

But eventually, in the early 21st century, a varied group of scientists began to realize that this Propagative Layer was sentient. And it was manipulating the communications (video, audio, textual) being sent through it, editing a word or inflection here, a fractional-second of video there, for the purpose of altering human behaviour. As a result we have a century of "relative peace", what amounts to a global nanny state, which we are unaware of.

But some research is shunted aside, dismissed, unfunded. Some people find themselves out of jobs. Then, one day, a group of these in-the-know scientists are murdered in one day, around the globe. And even worse, the attackers are human simulacra, guided by the Propagative Layer. Human in all identifiable respects, expect that if mortally wounded, they bleed green as well as red.

That's when a small group of survivors go into hiding. And plan. Because a way to defeat this alien invasion must be found, WILL be found... eventually.

Of course, this book is that eventuality. And, of course, things are not what they seem. Horrifying not what they seem.

I'm impressed that I still enjoyed the entire experience, even though I simply could not buy into the book's central conceit about the aliens. Normally, this would have prevented me from even finishing another author's book. Bravo, again, Mr. Wilson.

[augustvonorth · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Robert Charles Wilson is an author I’ve always enjoyed for the mysterious other-worldly feeling he brings to a story, and for his intense character-focused prose. So when Burning Paradise came out, it immediately jumped unto my reading list. I am happy to report that this novel measured up to expectations in both feeling and prose. It is an alternate reality story told from the point of view of several different characters. In this alternate reality the world has lived in a peaceful utopia since World War I, with none of the wars and conflicts that have happened in the real world. The problem is that this is no accident, human conflict has been suppressed by an alien entity resident in the upper atmosphere that manipulates communications on Earth to its own ends. Very few people know what is going on, the rest of the human race has no idea that they are being robbed of self-determination.

I really like what Wilson has done in creating this alien entity. The alien consists of microscopic organisms distributed in the atmosphere and communicating with each other to form a giant insect-like colony. In itself this isn’t a new concept, various types of such insect-like colonies have been done over and over again in fiction. Usually such colonies end up being innumerable drones ruled by a queen who is essentially human. Wilson takes a very different approach; his colony isn’t self-aware in the way a human is, but rather just a complex system capable of sophisticated actions to achieve the natural goals of living and reproducing, but without emotion or conscience like a self-aware being. This makes it more like a force of nature than a human antagonist. This is an alien that is truly alien, not just a human in disguise.

The one nit I would pick with this novel concerns the ending. I won’t throw any spoilers in here by giving details, I’ll just say that it had a bit of a deus ex machina feel to it. On the other hand, one thing that he did very well is show characters with very different reactions to how events evolved. Basically, some characters would have been happier if nobody messed with the alien entity, preferring the peaceful ignorance of living unaware under the alien’s control to the strife and uncertainty of self-determination. This attitude might sound crazy to a modern sensibility, but in real life I think this might represent the secret feelings of many people. I think it was gutsy of Wilson to go ahead and develop characters with these attitudes, despite the fact that it might rub many readers the wrong way.

Overall I wouldn’t rate this novel up with Wilson’s best, but it was definitely a good read. It’s just that some of his past work was so excellent that I have very high expectations when I see something new from him.

[evaw-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cassie's parents were murdered by 'sims' - human manifestations of a living being in the radiosphere ... A page-turner with a couple of unexpected (at least to me) twists at the end!

[bemidt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Alternate history that qualifies as Science Fiction. Kept me reading almost nonstop until the end of the book, hanging on every word. When I was finished all I thought was, "Well that was kinda dumb. Fun yes, but kinda dumb." Robert Charles Wilson is obviously a virtuoso writer, but this book lacked substance. It felt like it was written for the purpose of fulfilling a quota for his publisher. Ya know, a whole bunch of ideas thrown together in great haste. I won't give up on old RCW quite yet, I here Spin was really good.

[dukedom_enough · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In an alternate-history 2014, the world has not known a large-scale war since the Great War ended in armistice, in 1914. Cassie Iverson, 18, is among a few people who know that this peace has been carefully cultivated by an alien influence, and not for human benefit. This influence rules through control of radio and television transmissions, and it is intent on keeping its presence unknown to the majority of the human species. Cassie’s world is a better place than ours, but only for those of us ignorant of this influence, and only for as long as it needs us.Seven years earlier, her parents were murdered by its agents - apparent humans whose bodies are filled mainly with amorphous green material. Now she is again pursued by these “sims”, and must flee with her 12 year old brother, beginning a journey that will end in a confrontation with the alien force, and discovery of its uses for humanity.Wilson’s signature move as a science fiction writer is to contrast everyday, small, human dramas of growth, ambition and love against the vast, ancient, indifferent cosmos discovered by science. [Burning Paradise] provides a resolution of the Fermi Paradox in terms of evolution acting over timespans longer than the age of the Earth; it also gives us a young protagonist coming of age under a remorseless threat unknown to her peaceful contemporaries. This novel is more of a thriller than most of Wilson’s books. He handles Cassie’s and others’ run from peril competently, but this sort of story isn’t his strongest point. If you haven’t read Wilson before, then, rather than this book, I suggest his Hugo Award-winning [Spin], or his wise dystopian [Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America].

[rbeffa_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wilson's most recent novel begins in November 2014, the month I read it and am writing this. As the flyleaf says: "Cassie Iverson, eighteen years old, lives in the United States in the year 2014 - but it's not our United States and it's not our 2014. Cassie's world has been more or less at peace since the Great Armistice of 1914. There was no World War II, no Great Depression. ... But Cassie knows the world isn't what it seems."Cassie's world is now celebrating the centenary of the great peace. But what is the true cost and secret behind the peace? I found this to be a terribly interesting story. Scary and creepy as hell, too. Cassie has just graduated from high school and she and her younger brother Thomas have lived with her Aunt for 7 years following the murder of her parents and many of their friends and colleagues. They knew a secret about the world. Cassie and her Aunt know it too. Cassie, with her brother, must flee her refuge when she recognizes the identity of an agent accidently killed in a traffic accident outside her apartment. She knows the drill. You go to ground and you run. Her uncle Ethan Iverson has a parallel story here as well when he recognizes the approach of another agent. We meet other characters also, including a couple that have probably gone off the rails after discovering the secret. Plenty of surprises as the story unfolds, and it is told very well, although it felt a little drawn out at times.The paranoia aspect was a plus. There is a 50's-ish as well as modern surveillance paranoia that in this case is well justified. You don't know who you can trust. I don't want to give it away. I'm tempted to go on a binge of the Robert Charles Wilson books I haven't read.

[alanpoulter_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cassie sees a strange man hanging around outside their flat. Her guardian, her Aunt, is away. He notices Cassie and starts across the road towards the flat. At that moment a car comes careening around a corner and hits the man crossing the road. Cassie sees that his blood is green.... She leaves a note for her Aunt, grabs her younger brother and heads on foot to a safe house. Cassie is connected to a group of academics who have discovered that human history has been altered over the years by aliens, with the intent to spread themselves to other stars. The academics, and others privy to this secret, are on the aliens' hitlist, hence Cassie's hasty flight. This is a wonderfuly paranoid novel as it turnsout that the aliens have factions, giving plenty of scope for double-dealing. And the aliens can create copies of people as agents and are building means of spreading themselves to other planets....Perhaps the only minor niggle in this scenario is when individual aliens converse with humans. Could a bee be (or emulate being) a 'person/hive spokes-thing'? Minor niggles aside, this novel is crying out for a television adaptation....

[kgodey_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This books takes an interesting premise (spacefaring alien hivemind subtly influencing human affairs, resulting in an alternate history where World War I never happened) and makes it into a really dull book. The characters are flat and what personality they do display is unlikable, the central conflict makes no sense, the scientist characters make far too many assumptions and the ending is bewildering.

[zzshupinga · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

ARC provided by NetGalleyIt's the year 2015 and Cassie Klyne is nineteen years old and lives in the United States. But this is not the United States that we know....or even the world we know. There has been peace since the Armistice of 1918, poverty is declining, prosperity is increasing, and things in the world look up. But...it's all a lie. Back at the dawn of radio communications a small group discovered that progress has been interfered with, and humans have been made more peaceful and benign by an unknown entity, that is seemingly farming us for unknown purposes. Most of this group, including Cassie's parents, have been killed for this knowledge. And the survivors have stayed hidden and waiting. And it's worked...until now. For the unknown has finally come.Reading this description how could I not be interested in the book? The world at peace, due to alien interference is intriguing and disquieting and makes you wonder...could this really happen? Robert Wilson has written a disquieting and captivating story, one that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very end. I love the premise of the book, that someone else is shepherding us, guiding us for purposes yet unknown. And is the fact that we're more gentle a good thing? What are the trade offs? These are the questions that Wilson expertly guides us through with fantastic characters and great action. This is my first time reading one of Wilson's books and I think I'm now hooked for life, it was just that good. I'd recommend this to any fan of science fiction, particularly those that enjoy Rick Yancey's recent 5th Wave book, or fans of Issac Asimov. I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.