Spin
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, a 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 year 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.
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
One night the stars go out. From that breathtaking "what if," Wilson (Blind Lake, etc.) builds an astonishingly successful mélange of SF thriller, growing-up saga, tender love story, father-son conflict, ecological parable and apocalyptic fable in prose that sings the music of the spheres. The narrative time oscillates effortlessly between Tyler Dupree's early adolescence and his near-future young manhood haunted by the impending death of the sun and the earth. Tyler's best friends, twins Diane and Jason Lawton, take two divergent paths: Diane into a troubling religious cult of the end, Jason into impassioned scientific research to discover the nature of the galactic Hypotheticals whose "Spin" suddenly sealed Earth in a "cosmic baggie," making one of its days equal to a hundred million years in the universe beyond. As convincing as Wilson's scientific hypothesizing is--biological, astrophysical, medical--he excels even more dramatically with the infinitely intricate, minutely nuanced relationships among Jason, Diane and Tyler, whose older self tries to save them both with medicines from Mars, terraformed through Jason's genius into an incubator for new humanity. This brilliant excursion into the deepest inner and farthest outer spaces offers doorways into new worlds--if only humankind strives and seeks and finds and will not yield compassion for our fellow beings. Agent, Shawna McCarthy. (Apr. 14)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Spin is not merely a SF thriller. It’s also a coming-of-age tale, a love story, a literary triumph, and an ecological and apocalyptic warning. The award-winning Wilson excels at all aspects of his tale, from the human angle to the political, religious, biological, medical, and astrophysical theorizing. The first part elicited "jaw-dropping amazement" from critics; luckily, the pace slows over the remaining pages to recount the next few decades on Earth (Emerald City). If the plot involving the terraforming and colonization of Mars seems farfetched, put it in the context of Wilson’s deep characterization and convincing relationships, and you’ll be OK. After all, Spin is "a book about faith: especially our faith in ourselves" (Emerald City).
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Review
"Robert Charles Wilson is a hell of a storyteller."
--Stephen King “One night the stars go out. From that breathtaking ‘what if,’ Wilson builds an astonishingly successful mélange of SF thriller, growing-up saga, tender love story, father-son conflict, ecological parable and apocalyptic fable in prose that sings the music of the spheres.”
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Spin
“Robert Charles Wilson is one of the best science-fiction writers alive, a fact borne out in his latest work… Spin is the best science-fiction novel so far this year.”
--Rocky Mountain News
“Wilson’s most ambitious and most successful novel to date…Wide-ranging and well-crafted.”
--San Diego Union-Tribune on Spin
“The long-anticipated marriage between the hard sf novel and the literary novel, resulting in an offspring possessing the robust ideational vigor of the former with the graceful narrative subtleties of the latter, might finally have occurred in the form of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin. Here's a book that features speculative conceits as brash and thrilling as those found in any space opera, along with insights into the human condition as rich as those contained within any mainstream mimetic fiction, with both its conceits and insights beautifully embedded in crystalline prose….Wilson does so many fine things, it's hard to know where to begin to praise him.”
--The Washington Post
“Of all SF writers currently active, Robert Charles Wilson may well be the best at balancing cosmic drama with human drama…Spin is many things: psychological novel, technological thriller, apocalyptic picaresque, cosmological meditation. But it is, foremost, the first major SF novel of 2005, another triumph for Robert Charles Wilson in a long string of triumphs.”
--Locus
"One of SF's distinctive qualities, often derided by mainstream critics as a weakness, is its literalization of metaphor, but Wilson's masterful exploitation of the Membrane's fictional possibilities provides an exhilarating demonstration of why precisely the opposite can be true...Spin is also a family drama that would not be out of place on mainstream shelves...Spin is a provocative, frequently dazzling read."
--SCIFI.COM
“A subtle and thought-provoking writer. Just when the reader thinks he knows where Wilson is going, he finds himself somewhere else entirely.”
--Robin Hobb on Robert Charles Wilson
“Robert Charles Wilson continues to surprise and delight. I can’t think of another science fiction writer who understands the strengths of the genre so well and who works with such confidence within its elastic boundaries…Wilson never loses sight of the human angle. His theme is the importance of communication, which, as his characters come to learn, should never remain one-way.”
--The New York Times on Blind Lake
“A superior SF thriller.”
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Blind Lake
“Fizzing with ideas…Intense, absorbing, memorable.”
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) on Blind Lake
“The steely quiet of Blind Lake draws you in like a magnet…Wilson does not ever raise his voice, which does not mean he speaks softly. How he speaks is still. In his calm, stony exile’s gaze upon the prisons of the world, and in his measured adherence to storylines that say that everything may become a little better with much work, he is the most purely Canadian of all the writers brought together here, and Blind Lake is the finest Canadian novel of all these.”
--John Clute, Toronto Globe and Mail
"An astonishingly successful m�lange of SF thriller, growing-up saga... and apocalyptic fable in prose that sings the music of the spheres." (Publishers Weekly )
"Wilson is one of the best science-fiction writers alive. Spin is the best science-fiction novel so far this year." (Rocky Mountain News )
"Wilson's most ambitious and most successful novel to date.Wide-ranging and well-crafted." (San Diego Union-Tribune )
"Wilson does so many fine things, it''s hard to know where to begin to praise him." (The Washington Post )
"Yhe first major SF novel of 2005, another triumph for Robert Charles Wilson in a long string of triumphs." (Locus )
"Spin is a family drama that would not be out of place on mainstream shelves... a provocative, frequently dazzling read." (SCIFI.COM )
Customer Reviews
Dissapointing
The process of reading this book seemed much longer than it actually was. The parts of the book that actually deal with plot progression are few and far between, and we are mostly relegated to reading the conversations of a group of completely uninteresting people, exemplified by the sterile narrator Tyler Dupree, who is one of the least engaging characters in fiction. Unfortunately 90% of the contents of this book have no effect on the plot and the book suffers from it, as well as having one of the main characters, Diane, having absolutely no reason for inclusion except to pad the page count. All that aside, their are many interesting concepts and ideas to be found in Spin, it's just a shame that you have to slog through the whole book to get to them.
Nothing less than perfect
This book is that rare combination in sci-fi, or in any other genre or non-genre literature for that matter: fascinating plot, well-constructed and engrossing characters, and enough ideas to leave you wondering for months. It's absolutely brilliant.
Another great premise - spins itself to nowhere.
I love a unique sci-fi premise. This one delivers that in spades. And, it's the premise and the pursuit of understanding what's occurred and how it will be resolved that kept me reading (occassionally through, what could only be generously called some very convoluted writing).
Ultimately, though, this book just failed to deliver on the great premise. The ending is one, that as it approached, I found myself counting pages - wondering how the situation could be explained and resolved in any sort of meaningful way with so little left to read. The answer was simple, it wasn't going to be.
BOTTOM LINE: Even for unique sci-fi premise fans, I'd look elsewhere first - or just read it with low expectations of the outcome.
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