I very much enjoyed Robert Charles Wilson's Spin and I was looking forward to reading Darwinia. I'm glad I read them in the order I did because I thought Spin was superb and Darwinia both trite and silly. The characters are well drawn and relationships matter but the central premise -- that earth (and the rest of the universe) is essentially a library book come to life and is rewriting itself because of the attack of computer viruses on steroids; that everything we know is composed of a vast cosmological battle between sentience and these viruses... well, it's an interesting idea.

Darwinia feels as if it could have been great but it isn't. It feels tacked together from several weaker ideas and grand notions and never quite evolves beyond itself. Oh well, you can't always write a masterpiece.