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| Spin | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Charles Wilson
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy New: $3.87
You Save: $4.12 (52%)
Buy New/Used from $2.21
Avg. Customer Rating:  (113 reviews)
Sales Rank: 10161
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.7
ISBN: 076534825X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780765348258
ASIN: 076534825X
Release Date: February 7, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 111-113 of 113 | | « PREV 1 ... | | |
 Extravagant ideas, quiet tone May 14, 2005
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
The first major SF novel from a major publisher in 2005 that I have seen is Robert Charles Wilson's _Spin_. Wilson is one of my favorite current writers. His recent novels have all been quite striking, and all are based on quite extravagant SF ideas, yet are markedly quiet in tone, and markedly character-based. br /br /Beth Meacham recently complained in Locus that SF seems to consist largely of two sorts of books: very mainstream-style books with one modest SFnal idea; or very wildly SFnal books that demand from the reader an intimate knowledge of the field's tropes. Robert Sawyer vs. Charles Stross, one might suggest. _Spin_, I think, is a counter-example. It is based on a truly audacious central idea, and the idea is quite cleverly extrapolated -- its implications are nicely explored. Yet the heart of the book is an extended look at one man's lifelong friendship/love affair with his boyhood neighbors, a pair of twins, brother and sister; set in a near future not too terribly different from today.br /br /The book alternates sections set, the titles tell us, very far in the future (4 billion A. D.), with near future sections. The narrator is Tyler Dupree, who is undergoing some sort of drastic medical treatment while on the run from U. S. officials. While mentally unbalanced by the treatment he compulsively writes down his memories of his life to date, beginning with the onset of what came to be called "the Spin". One night when Tyler is 12, and his twin friends Jason and Diane are 13, the stars suddenly disappear. Earth is somehow enshrouded -- satellites crash, the Moon is invisible, the Sun still shines but oddly changed. It soon becomes clear that a barrier, eventually called "the Spin", is affecting time oddly -- time outside it passes much more rapidly than on Earth. Space vehicles can be launched and pass through the barrier -- they seem to return instantly, but they observe time passing outside it, and they observe, for instance, the Solar System continuing to evolve, such that after some decades, the Sun will have changed so as to make Earth uninhabitable. Thus, people of Tyler's generation grow up in the knowledge that likely the world will soon end.br /br /Tyler's mother works for Jason and Diane's father as a maid. E. D. Lawton is a powerful defense contractor who is smart enough to be in place to react quickly to the Spin -- for example by setting up a network of aerostats to replace the now defunct GPS satellites. His wife Carol is a former doctor, now an alcoholic. Tyler falls in love with Diane from an early age, but a combination of factors keep them apart. (Tyler's shyness, a perceived class or financial status difference, E. D.'s hostility.)br /br /The three children react differently to the Spin. Jason, to some extent following in his father's footsteps, is desperate to understand it, and perhaps to fix it. Diane is afraid of it, and drifts into a cult which treats the Spin as an harbinger of the Christian End Times. Tyler stays close to Jason, and mostly tries to live a semblance of an ordinary life, becoming a doctor himself. Eventually Jason hires him to work at Perihelion, a corporation cum government agency working to investigate Spin-related phenomena.br /br /The book very successfully combines an involving small-scale story (the story of Tyler's relationship with the Lawton twins, and of the entire world in the shadow of apocalypse) with a fascinating large-scale SF story (the story of the Spin, its origin and the results of some decades of dealing with it). The first story is satisfying enough, but ultimately it is the extrapolations of the effects of the temporal disconnect between Earth and the rest of the universe that are most compelling. Wilson uses this as a way to look at "deep time" through the eyes of contemporary humans. As only a few years pass on Earth while millions of years pass outside the Spin barrier, it is possible to do really long-duration experiments. Some of these have downright cool effects -- I won't detail these here -- I'll leave the surprises to the novel. But Wilson does not cheat the reader -- we do learn pretty much what's going on with the Spin, and why. And it's neat stuff. Definitely a contender for the major SF awards.br /
Your average excellent Robert Charles Wilson novel December 9, 2004
75 out of 87 found this review helpful
I managed to snag an advanced copy of this novel last week, which I finished in about a day and a half reading during lunch breaks, bathroom breaks and the hours before bedtime. As per usual, Wilson does an excellent job of keeping me up at night. br /br /For those who are familiar with Robert Charles Wilson's work, "Spin" should come as no surprise. Most of his novels feature a conflicted protagonist who is caught up in storms of intrigue and extraordinary circumstances. Wilson's stories typically focus 70% on the characters and 30% on the science. His characters walk away from these experiences utterly changed, for better or for worse. Their arcs aren't always pleasant but usually realistic. You could easily put yourself into their shoes. br /br /"Spin" is no exception. br /br /As the previous reviewer pointed out, Wilson's one weakness is his endings. The endings are usually a rush to tie together loose ends, explain away anything that wasn't properly explained before. "Blind Lake" fell into this trap. "The Chronoliths" did not. Thankfully, "Spin" falls into the latter catagory.
Completely engrossing October 22, 2004
90 out of 103 found this review helpful
The time is, if not right now, the reasonably near future. Tyler Dupree is the twelve-year-old son of the housekeeper for a major aerospace industrialist. His best friends are the industrialists' twin children, Diane and Jason Lawton. One evening, when the kids are illicitly outside during an adult party at the Big House, the stars and the moon disappear. All satellite communication, and everything dependent on it, is lost. The sun rises in the morning-but, as scientists subsequently learn, it's not the real sun. Earth has been encased in a membrane, and time on Earth has been dramatically slowed: a minute on Earth, inside the membrane, is a century or more outside. One of the things the membrane is doing is filtering and regulating the sunlight, so Earth continues to experience normal day and night, and seasons.br /This phenomenon quickly acquires the popular name "the Spin." The Lawtons' father, E.D., quickly capitalizes on one piece of the disruption caused by it by promoting aerostats as a replacement for the lost satellites. And he grooms his genius son Jason to become the world's greatest expert on the Spin.br /The cultural effects of the Spin are more disruptive, at least in the short term. As it becomes clear that the Spin is not any sort of natural phenomenon, there are only two ways of explaining it: either it's a technological phenomenon created by unknown alien beings (the "Hypotheticals"), or it represents the direct action of God. As it becomes clear that the slowing of time on Earth will result in Earth being out of the habitable zone of the sun in fifty or sixty years, the notion that Earth's inhabitants are now living in the End Times becomes obvious and logical. While E.D. continues to do what he has always done (wheel, deal, seize economic and political advantage, emotionally abuse his family) Jason becomes obsessed with understanding the Spin scientifically, Diane joins an ecstatic, hedonistic religious cult called the New Kingdom, and Tyler just tries to get on with his life, going to medical school and becoming a doctor. That's not so easy; Tyler has always been the emotional stabilizer for the more volatile Lawton twins, and they both keep calling on him to fill that role. While Diane moves through the world of End Times religious cults, Jason uses his father's business and political ambitions to build a government agency dedicated to understanding the Spin and, once the Spin membrane is found to be permeable to spacecraft in both directions (but not to signals of any kind), to terraforming Mars to preserve the human race. This works fairly well, until two things happen: it becomes clear to the public that success with the Mars project is not going to save the lives of more than trivial numbers of people on Earth, and the Spin membrane starts flickering, an apparent prelude to breaking down entirely as aging Sol, now reaching the end of its life, expands.br /This is a beautifully written, completely engrossing book. I've occasionally complained that Wilson's books don't have entirely satisfactory endings; this one does. Highly recommended.br /
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