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(Tor, ISBN 076534825X )
Spin seems to have attracted a fair bit of praise for skillfully combining a mainstream character-driven novel with big SF. Knowing that before I read the book, perhaps I set my expectations a little too high - this isn't quite a super-hybrid of Annie Proulx and Greg Egan. Nonetheless, it's a really impressive SF story with real characters. It's not the first, but perhaps it's a sign that the DMZ between the genres has softened a little.
Spin is narrated by Tyler Dupree, a young teenager when the book starts. He is out one night watching the stars with his friends Jason and Diane Lawton, when the stars disappear, hidden by a membrane that encircles the Earth. The world gradually learns that beyond the membrane, time is moving faster, leaving only 50 years or so on Earth before the sun expands to the point where the planet will be uninhabitable.
The story of what happens in that time is the subject of the novel. Jason becomes a powerful figure in the aerospace industry, struggling to understand the nature of the Spin membrane. Diane turns to religion, and Jason becomes a doctor, bound into the orbit of Jason through friendship, and suffering from a mostly unrequited love for Diane. Saying almost anything about the plot would reveal marvellous surprises and inventions by Wilson - suffice it to say that the Earth's response is to use the time distortion effects of the Spin to their advantage, and that the ending does make sense of the strange times through which the characters live.
While the immediate cast of the novel is quite small, Wilson also manages to consider the response of the wider world in a fairly realistic way. Civilization does not collapse when the Spin descends, but the changes that come as people reconsider their place in the universe, and the fact that they may personally see the end of the world, creates a quite stark parable about the way we currently use the resources of Earth. That this doesn't make the novel into a diatribe (*cough* Forty Signs of Rain *cough*) is another mark to Wilson's credit.
So overall I really enjoyed this book. I wanted to know what happened next, and I found it hard to put down once I'd started. Does the world end with a bang or a whimper? Read Spin and you'll be pleasantly surprised. I was.
There's a good discussion of the book and related topics on Making Light.
Posted by MFreestone at March 16, 2006 02:08 PM