Should you find yourself in an airport before a transatlantic flight with nothing to read, I suggest you pick up a copy of Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia. The book starts off as an alternate history of naturalism in the early 20^th Century, and then turns into something more like The Matrix, if The Matrix were retold on a cosmic scale and ended with a war in heaven fought between four-armed Sleestaks and Grizzly Adams-like avatars of trillion-year-old seeds of consciousness in a primeval Rhine Valley palimpsested in space-time over the killing fields of World War I: ghosts evolving free will in a simulation powered by galaxy-sized, entropy-resistant computers at the end of time.