Review: SPIN by Robert Charles Wilson
Publisher’s Description:
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his
back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once,
then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best
friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout.
It would shape their lives.
The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk–a heat source,
rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only
have the world’s artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered
remains are pitted and aged, as though they’d been in space far longer than
their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a
bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts.
Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside–more than a hundred
million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are
only about forty years in our future.
Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this
slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister
cult leader who’s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.
Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work,
turning the planet green. Next they send humans…and immediately get back an
emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars.
Then Earth’s probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars.
Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will
scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun–and report back on what they
find.
Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.
Review:
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 famil
y
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.