464 pages
English language
Published Feb. 7, 2006
Spin is a science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer Robert Charles Wilson. It was published in 2005 and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006. It is the first book in the Spin trilogy, with Axis (the second) published in 2007 and Vortex published in July 2011. In January 2015, Syfy announced it was developing a six-hour miniseries based on the book.
Interesting book - aliens (who never reveal themselves) cover the Earth in something that stops the view of space from the ground and makes time pass much more slowly on Earth than the rest of the Universe. The book follows two siblings from a rich and influential family and their childhood friend.
A Big Dumb Object has put the earth on a delay - each year inside equals a hundred million years outside.
You'd imagine this would make the tale somehow more brisk in its telling. Instead we focus on Elon Musk's best friend and accompain his excruciatingly long and boring life for an excruciatingly long and boring time, while Elon Musk attempts to rescue earth.
Correction: this is an idealized Elon Musk - a sexless, humorless creature that only cares about playing chess with aliens, instead of the meme-loving car salesman we have in our non-fictional world.
It's the neoliberal approach to crisis management: in case of apocalypse, trust the richest, most tech-savvy person with all your resources and defend them to the death from the evil fanatics, the government and the media, while you yourself just focus on living your life the exact same way you've been doing.
Far out concept. I found the interleaving of time throughout the book to be well done, but not exceptional.
This was a re-read for me as I finally had a decent ebook version. It remains as impressive as it was the first time. Big ideas grounded in a human story, that while straightforward, provides the contrast that the big canvas sci-fi ideas can play out against. Now for the rest of the trilogy.
I like this book, but found the ending anticlimactic. The plot development got a little choppy, with all the flashbacks and flash-forwards. The storyline itself wasn't hard to follow, developing nicely with the characters.
I can't really put this book into the "Hard" Science Fiction category. I had a couple of moments of "suspension of disbelief". Logic holes are never good in Hard SciFi. And there was a bit too much of the Black Box technique, whereby we are forced to just accept without explanation that this thing works.
Hence, the two stars. I might be a touch stingy with my star ratings. I looked over my first wave of books, and found that everything was at least four stars. I did like this book, but I'm getting cranky as I use this website more and more.
