Canadian science-fiction novelist Robert Charles Wilson hopes to jump the genre barrier with his latest novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America. (Robert Charles Wilson)After submitting his most recent novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, to his publishers, Robert Charles Wilson received a phone call that was perhaps a little more enthusiastic than he expected.

'This book could move outside the traditional genre audience. It's not necessarily jargon-laden and it doesn't necessarily depend on a prior knowledge of science fiction.'

—Robert Charles Wilson

"My editor said, 'Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think anyone thought you could write a book this good,'" the Toronto-based author recalls. "It was a bit of a left-handed compliment, but it sort of set the tone for the publisher's response."

Wilson's 13 previous novels have earned him a loyal readership and international acclaim in the science-fiction community. But it was his 2005 novel, Spin, which won a Hugo Award and garnered a rave from Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly, which ultimately raised expectations.

King described Spin as "SF that doesn't know it's SF," and the same could be said about Julian Comstock, which is a science-fiction novel disguised as a page-turning Civil War-era adventure novel. In Wilson's version of the future, an infertility epidemic, the end of oil and the overbearing influence of a Christian fundamentalist group called the Dominion has reverted North America to a largely agrarian society in which indentured servants work the fields and drive the horse-drawn carriages of their landholding masters.

The novel is narrated by Adam Hazzard, a farm boy who belongs to the country's leasing class. He gives the book its earnest, slightly antique voice. The naive 18-year-old relates his adventures with Julian Comstock, a young aristocrat whose father was murdered by his uncle, Deklan Comstock — who also happens to be president of the United States.

With the U.S. at war with the Dutch — that's right, the Dutch — in Labrador, Hazzard and Comstock are conscripted into the U.S. Army, where Julian becomes a war hero loved by his fellow soldiers and warily regarded by his superiors for his heretical speeches. The book eventually leads them to New York, the national capital and home of the Presidential Palace (which is housed in the former Central Park).

Wilson notes that Julian Comstock could be lumped together with classic science-fiction novels that deal with dystopian or post-apocalyptic worlds. But he also admits that, of his novels, it has the best chance of reaching general readers.

"This book could move outside the traditional genre audience," he says. "It's not necessarily jargon-laden and it doesn't necessarily depend on a prior knowledge of science fiction." Readers who haven't read Isaac Asimov or Robert A. Heinlein might find that Julian Comstock compares well to genre-friendly "literary" novels like Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape.

After settling on his post-oil, 22nd-century setting, Wilson decided to immerse himself in American pop culture of the 19th century as a point of comparison.

(Tor Books) "The present we look at now would look utterly bizarre to someone in 1860 or 1870," notes Wilson, who was born in California, but immigrated to Canada in 1962, at age nine. "I would like to think Lincoln would be pleased if you told him an African-American would eventually be elected president, but if you told him [Obama] would be elected on a Democratic ticket, I think his jaw would drop. Similarly, if you took someone from 1860 and told them the U.S. would be involved in an air war over Afghanistan, and one of the major cultural issues would be gay rights, he'd be shocked. I tried to build a similar degree of estrangement to the future."

Wilson says the novel's title character was partly inspired by historian Edward Gibbon's story of Julian the Apostate, the last non-Christian Roman emperor. The novel's detailed and imaginatively rendered battlefield sequences were influenced by William Taylor Adams, a now-obscure U.S. writer who wrote popular Civil War children's novels under the pen name Oliver Optic.

The Optic novels, says Wilson, "were written right at the end of the Civil War, and [Adams] kind of wrote [them] as a way of introducing young adults to an unpleasant world. There's warfare, racism and, of course, slavery. And there's also something about the tone that's ghastly and funny at the same time. For instance, there's one paragraph describing a naval battle and the 17-year-old narrator says, 'A cannonball nipped off the head of the man standing next to me. This was so irregular I did not know quite what to do.' It's like Guernica repainted by Norman Rockwell."

Like many sci-fi novels, which offer commentary on the present day, the alternate world presented in Julian Comstock invites comparisons to the United States in the early 21st century. Wilson points out that the headquarters of the theocratic dominion is in Colorado Springs, Colo., the real-life home of James Dobson's faith-based organization Focus on the Family. Wilson admits it's also a "nice coincidence" that his book is being published in the same year as the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, whom Julian reveres and whose life story becomes a central plot point later in the novel.

Though Canada is now home to science-fiction luminaries like William Gibson and Robert J. Sawyer, the 56-year-old Wilson recalls a humbler period. "I'm old enough to remember a time when aspiring science-fiction writers in Canada would wonder aloud whether to set a story in Toronto or New York, or move a story from Vancouver to Los Angeles," he says. "There are now dozens and dozens of Canadian science-fiction writers who have Canadian settings without apology and found perfectly receptive audiences."

While setting a novel in Canada is still considered unwise for authors seeking an international audience, Wilson has found an ingenious way around this problem in Julian Comstock. Although lengthy passages of the novel take place in our country's Prairies, Newfoundland and Montreal, Wilson has it both ways, by setting his story in a version of America with 60 states.

"It was kind of a sad thing to do," Wilson says, about fictionally annexing Canada into the States, "but in the scenario I was postulating, it seemed one possible option. And I think it adds an interesting flavour in the book. Although the characters think of themselves as Americans, what America means in their heads is something different in the future. It's really a North American novel."

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America is published by Tor Books and is in stores June 9.

Kevin Chong is a writer based in Vancouver.