Book Review: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Spin (Spin, #1) by Robert Charles Wilson
Narrator: Scott Brick
Series: Spin #1
Published by Tor Science Fiction on February 7, 2006
Genres: Science-Fiction
Pages: 458
Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
Format: Audiobook
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From the author of Axis and Vortex , the first Hugo Award-winning novel in the environmental apocalyptic Spin Trilogy...
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 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.

This book narrates Tyler’s life as it revolves around the Lawton twins during a global phenomenon known as the Spin, and how they helped shape humanity during those catastrophic years.

I picked up this book searching for mystery, wonder, science, and perhaps first contact. In some ways, it delivered, and while I found the events interesting and the writing compelling, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was either focusing on parts of the story I wasn’t invested in or evolving in unexpected but undesirable directions.

I spent the entire book wanting to know more about the Hypotheticals and why they isolated Earth from the rest of the universe. What I got was mostly human drama, terror, and cults seeking answers to world events. I understood this was relevant and a probable side effect of the Spin, but I didn’t want the story centered on it. I wanted to know what we were learning about the Hypotheticals.

Turns out we learned very little, and what we eventually discovered wasn’t particularly interesting. Still, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the journey. While the three main characters’ relationship is somewhat problematic, I appreciated the familiarity of following their lives through the Spin years. I particularly enjoyed Jason’s experiments and the science behind terraforming Mars, though we never see the results. Most of the interesting action happens off-camera, but the suggestion of it is sometimes enough to make the book compelling.

Although the main characters are moderately developed, their relationships with secondary characters felt superficial. What frustrated me most was how information was withheld through dialogue; a character would start explaining something only to say at some point that they couldn’t keep talking. It felt artificial and annoying.

I enjoyed the dual timeline connecting past and present, though Tyler’s writing urgency to explain the past also felt contrived.

All in all, it was a good book, but it didn’t satisfy my hunger for knowledge, space, and stars. In the end, it all felt a bit prosaic.

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