As John Scalzi noted on his blog, it’s worth noting and celebrating that Robert Charles Wilson won the Hugo Award for Spin, which was an award not only well-deserved for the novel in question, but long-overdue when it comes to that writer’s career.   

Here’s what I wrote about Spin, when I read it back in June of last year:

Spin is a superb novel full of Big Ideas, but those Big Ideas don’t come at the expense of rich character development as is so often the case with books of this sort.  Wilson has a real knack for creating characters one can empathize with and can really grow to care about.  The family relationship depicted here, between the narrator, Tyler Dupree, and his childhood friends Jason (the genius) and Diane (his first, unrequited love), is the real driving force of this novel, and is what makes it such a compelling page-turner.  The prose is clean and fluid, and Wilson expertly paces the book, keeping the reader engaged and anxious to find out what comes next.  This can be tricky in a novel that spans several subjective years (and billions of relativistic years), but Wilson pulls it off marvelously. 

Spin is exactly the sort of novel that I think we need to see more of, one that infuses the reader with that gosh-wow sense of wonder that many writers seem to have forgotten is the reason we all fell in love with the genre in the first place.