Review
SPIN
by Robert Charles Wilson
Tor, 364 pp.
One of humanity’s defining traits is the way we go about blissfully unaware of the infinitesimal slice of eternity we occupy. In reality, our lives, our civilization, our world are a single brief sparkle on the surface of a sea of time. But what if that sparkle were frozen, while everything else sped on, every day on Earth equalling 100-million years to the rest of the universe?
That’s the premise of Spin, the new novel by Robert Charles Wilson.
Wilson’s tale follows the lives of three people, beginning from their childhood backyard, where they watch the stars and moon vanish in a flash, shut out by a temporal membrane that comes to be known as the Spin. This porous shield seals off the Earth from the rest of the universe and holds it in a pocket of slow-time, while the remainder of creation hurtles on at an alarming time gradient: 3.17 years for every second of Earth time. There are no clues or hints of how or why this has happened, but the result is that the sun will exhaust its hydrogen and expand, cooking and then engulfing the entire planet in 40 years rather than billions. It will be the end of the world and the end of the biological smear called humanity.
The story is narrated by an everyman figure: Dr. Tyler Dupree. His life and the lives of his lifelong friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, bring the Spin and its consequences into an intimate focus.
Jason, a genius of high calibre, is obsessed by the Spin and the possible motives of who or what had done this – the prosaically named Hypotheticals. Under the aegis of his father, who has groomed him to be heir to a powerful economic dynasty, Jason seeks a way to save humanity from the Hypotheticals’ time trap. Faced with extinction, humanity turns to God’s salvation, which becomes Diane’s obsession. Tyler’s character binds both Jason and Diane to reality, with Diane also being Tyler’s obsession.
The plot line is classic SF: a Giant Thing meets plucky human ingenuity. And Wilson’s ideas for overcoming it will compel you to turn the pages as fast as you can read. Spin is very good stuff, for the most part, and it makes for very rewarding reading, with enough Great Big Ideas to play with and admire. But, that is half the story, unfortunately.
The novel is plaited together with two converging plotlines, one taking place several years after the resolution of the other. Reading Spin is a little like reading a novel and its sequel at the same time, with the sequel not as good. The tension and mystery of the Spin urge you on, while the second plot, virtually an extended denouement, tries but fails to keep up the pace. As well, the final solution to the Hypotheticals and the Spin is not just anticlimactic, it’s bloody disappointing.
But is this a book worth your hard-earned lucre? Damn right. Wilson’s brilliance is in word play, metaphors and those Great Big Ideas. And the saga of the Duprees and the Lawtons reads like a Southern Gothic novel from Faulkner or a Tennessee Williams play. These are people riddled with crippling secrets, lies and lovingly nursed hatreds and jealousies. Amid the terminal background of global extinction, it’s the parlour-room whispers and the rattling of skeletons in closets that make Spin not just a good read, but a book that will likely garner more awards for its author.
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