Book Review: Spin

Robert Charles Wilson

2005

Awards: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ – 

                                                 

This is the perfect book to read while lying on the beach in the hot summer sun. It feels a little bit like a pulpy, calculated page-turner, but it is well written and satisfyingly complex and has a great plot. The characters, in general, are not terribly appealing, but the narrator is at least nice enough to make you care what happens to him. The ending is a little convoluted, but not enough to wreck the book.

The story starts in the early 21^st century. A trio of teenaged friends—wealthy twins Diane and Jason and their housekeeper’s son, Tyler—are outside the twins’ house one night when suddenly the stars wink out. One minute the stars are there, and the next minute the sky is just flat black.

                                                        

They quickly learn that this is not a local phenomenon. The sun is still shining on the parts of the planet where it is day, but no one on the night side of Earth can see the stars or the moon. And all around the world, satellites are falling out of the sky and plunging to the ground.

                                                                                                                                                    

It turns out that a manned space station also fell to earth just minutes after the stars disappeared. The only surviving crew member at first appeared to have gone insane, since he claimed that (a) when they looked down from the station, all they could see was a big black sphere where the earth had been and that (b) they had stayed in orbit for three weeks, unable to contact anyone on the ground, before deciding to try hurtling themselves back to earth.

Eventually, putting all of this information together with data from exploratory probes sent up after the fact, scientists confirm that the Earth has been enclosed in a big semi-permeable wrapper. Man-made objects can pass through it but starlight and moonlight cannot. The light from the sun is being let through but is being actively moderated by the wrapper.

And the wrapper, which people have begun calling “the Spin,” has slowed down the passage of time. It has put the Earth into some kind of near stasis. To people on the planet, time appears to be passing at the same rate as it ever has. But outside the wrapper, the rest of the solar system and the universe are aging rapidly. One terrestrial second now equals 3.17 years of galaxy time. In other words, for every year that passes on Earth, a hundred million years pass by outside the Spin.

Which means that it will now only be a matter of decades before the sun expands into a red giant and burns Earth to a cinder.

The end of the world is suddenly, undeniably, right around the corner. And, not only that, but the existence of the Spin proves that there is indeed other intelligent life in the universe, that it is either cruel or uncaring, and that it exists on a time scale we can’t comprehend.

This, of course, causes all sorts of different reactions and raises all kinds of existential questions. And Wilson faces the major ones straight on. He is great at putting himself deep into his premise, seeing its potential consequences on people, and using each of his three main characters to explore them.

Diane reacts with a combination of terror and denial, grabbing desperately onto an apocalyptic religion that explains the Spin as the sign of God’s judgment. Her brother Jason throws himself into science, trying to figure out who put the Spin there and to find ways to remove it or at least ameliorate it. Tyler, the narrator of the story, becomes a doctor; he focuses on removing immediate sources of pain, helping people survive day to day and year to year, trying to ignore the fact that he can’t help humanity as a whole survive the next fifty years.

                                                                        

The positive side to Jason’s approach is that the Spin is an advantage rather than a source of hopelessness. For him, it is an opportunity to learn things about the universe we never could before. We can see stars dying and being born; we can send out probes that take millennia to reach their targets and see the results in our lifetimes. The most ambitious of Jason’s projects is a controversial effort to terraform Mars, made possible now since millions of years pass on Mars for each one of ours. Overtly using many of the processes described in Red Mars, his rockets send up containers of hardy lichens and other genetically modified life forms every few months with the goal of rapidly turning Mars into a livable planet.

Tyler is the only one who sees that even though science keeps Jason going, he is in just as much denial about the bigger reality as Diane is. Although Tyler’s job keeps him blessedly distracted much of the time, he still finds himself coming back to the same unwanted, agonizing question: what is the point of going on, of doing anything, when the end of the world is so close at hand? He is the voice of the agnostic and the realist who would like more than anything to escape into religion or science but who can’t get past the feeling that all brands of salvation are lies. Wilson handles Tyler’s existential confusion with courage and clarity.

Aside from all this deep thinking, there are also moments of truly beautiful writing. At one point, for example, the Spin barrier weakens and people can momentarily see the stars beyond it. The stars move and flicker as they go through thousands of years of change in a minute. The moon appears like a stop-motion film, flashing randomly in different phases in different parts of the sky. It is a lovely description of the universe as seen from a slow-moving Earth.