Last modified: 2006-10-28 by marc pasquin
Keywords: book | novel | mysterium | consolidated republic |
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Mysterium by Robert Charles Wilson. The novel involves a
small Michigan town that is transported to an alternate Earth by a
physics experiment performed at an adjacent government laboratory. The
alternate world is quite interesting, the point of divergence being
that the Roman Empire had managed to hold out for another few
hundred years, and in the meantime coopted a Gnostic Christianity into
its civic religion, with mixed results.
Eugene Ipavec, 22 august 2006
by Eugene Ipavec, 22 august 2006, based on the text.
The Consolidated Republic is under the sway of a rather vicious clericalist dictatorship, seemigly about midway between Cromwell and Hitler. Its flag is described on page 67 as being:
blue with white bars and a red star in the middle.The number of bars is not given; from context, either two or fifteen would be probable: Two for the consolidation of French and English colonies from which the state had arisen; fifteen for the original number of provinces. In the latter case however I suspect the author would have likelier used the word "stripe."