Spin
by Robert Charles Wilson
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Book Reviews of Spin
Book Review: Best. Science Fiction. Novel. Ever. (or at least in top five)
Summary: 5 Stars
_Spin_ by Robert Charles Wilson is the best. Science fiction novel. Ever. Yes, I mean that. I would put it up against _Dune_ , _A Fire Upon the Deep_, and _Ender's Game_, it is that unbelievably good. Or if it is not the best one ever, it definitely belongs in the top five.
Bold words I know and I run the risk of overselling the book but this novel is what other science fiction novelists should aspire to create. It has everything.
The basic premise - no spoilers here, you can get this from the back cover of the book - is that one October night the three main characters, three adolescents, Diane and Jason Lawton (fraternal twins) and their best friend Tyler Dupree are out on the lawn stargazing when the Moon and stars disappear, the sky become a flat black. Rushing inside, they learn that all satellite communications have been lost and the world is in a panic. News from the other side of the world is hard to come by, and the three wait with trepidation to see if the Sun will even rise in the morning.
It does, but it is a strange sun, an almost generic Sun, a perfect one without evidence of solar flares, prominences, or sunspots. An idealization of a Sun.
It becomes clear to the government, military, and scientists that a planet-spanning shield, a membrane, has been erected around the globe, completely blocking sight of the stars and Moon from the people of the Earth. The Sun that that people see, that is still driving the world's weather, ecology, and agriculture, is a simulacrum; for all intents and purposes, the real Sun but upon study obviously not an actual star.
It gets stranger though. The Spin membrane (the event comes to be called the Spin) has two highly unusual properties. One, it has produced a huge time discontinuity; for every second that passes on Earth, something like 3 years passes outside the membrane. Two, the membrane is selectively permeable. As obviously the Earth would be fried if 3 years of sunlight hit the planet every second, the "Sun" is a filtered representation of actual sunlight. Similarly, the planet is protected from similar accumulations of cosmic radiation. However, the membrane is permeable to manmade items, both coming and going. This is in fact how the unique temporal properties of the membrane were discovered, as survivors of the International Space Station fell to earth the first night of the Spin but claimed that they had been orbiting a frightening, black, blank world for three weeks! At first kept secret, this does eventually get out to the public.
The novel follows the next 30-odd years of history after the creation of the Spin membrane through the eyes of the three main characters. Each tackles the brave new era in his or her own way, each in ways that thoroughly flesh out the character, are true to the characters personalities and desires, and illuminate different aspects of the Spin Earth. Jason devotes his life to unraveling the mysteries of the Spin, trying to understand who did, what it means, and how to defeat it. Diane instead embraces religion, joining a different segment of the population who is trying to come to terms with the event through spiritual means. Tyler is in some sense the outsider, the unattached one, in the outside looking in as a child and still as an adult. He becomes a physician and travels between the two worlds, Diane's and Jason's.
The novel is also a love story, as Tyler nourishes strong unrequited love for Diane, who herself has strongly conflicted feelings for him in turn. As events in the Spin unfold, Diane and Tyler almost connect again and again but events in their personal lives - irrevocably tied up in the Spin - keep them apart.
It is an also an end of the world story. As 30-odd years pass on Earth, 300 billion years pass outside the Spin membrane. During that time the Sun has swollen and would be lethal to life on Earth if the membrane were to disappear. Instead of the Spin being seen as a prison, it instead becomes the only thing keeping humanity alive. But for how long? Will the membrane disappear, the Earth left to the blazing and merciless fury of a senescent Sun, the oceans boiling away, all life turned to cinders and ash? Or is something else in store? Humanity - and the main characters - struggle with the issue.
The novel continually adds surprises, with developments in the characters personal lives, how the world reacts to the Spin, and the absolutely fascinating and exciting things that are done to study and fight against the Spin, wonderful things that have you exited as you read them, going to yourself, "wow, I never thought of that." So many things happen, things I would love to tell you about, but I won't. Get the book and read it. Now. This is epic science fiction. This has fantastic writing. This has incredibly well-done characters. And it has a mind-blowing ending. Oh, and a sequel, _Axis_, due out in September, which I plan to get.
Book Review: very creative, good characters
Summary: 5 Stars
Well, this is the most scientific science fiction I've ever read, with the exception of some of the stuff that came from Asimov, maybe Vernor Vinge. But Asimov was and Vinge is scientists as much as writers. I don't know this author's history. But there aren't any obvious flaws in the reasoning in this book, and that's what generally ticks me off the most, especially when they're in stories that win the Hugo Award. It seems he even did some real research into cosmology as well as into medicine based on the little thing he's got at the end of the book. The characters are good, the surprises are many, and I honestly couldn't think of what could possibly be the motivation for the hypotheticals - the hypothetical entities that spun the Earth - until the end, when it is explained. I thought there was going to be nothing the author could do to explain it because no possible motivation could explain such a crazy thing (the conundrum being that if it's an attack, there are far easier ways to destroy the human race, and if not, it doesn't SEEM to have any possibility to be BENEFICIAL to humanity), but it all makes perfect sense at the end. The one thing I don't like is the obnoxious order the story is told in. This is one of those books where the chronological order is like chapter 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9. So it keeps flipping back and forward and then the end of the earlier story eventually ends in the beginning of the second. Like the Sparrow, for instance. I have never found such things to be particularly artistic. Or fun. But for some reason Sci-Fi authors think it makes them cool. I say, read the book, but skip every chapter that begins with the year 4 billion until you get to the one that ends with 'we all land somewhere'. That's where the first interleved story ends, and that's where you should go back and read the first chapter and then just proceed from then on with the chapters entitled 4x10^9 AD (really it should be AD 4x10^9). I'm pretty sure it would be better that way anyway. It reveals certain things prematurely if you just read the book start to finish. In particular, a certain thing about what happens to Jason. And frankly, it was stupid knowing it was coming three quarters of the book away.
The only scientific foible I'd generally disagree with is the terraforming of Mars on such a long-term scale. The reason it does not have much of an atmosphere is not because it does not have much of a biosphere. Venus has no biosphere and it has an atmosphere to put Earth's to shame. The reason Mars does not have an atmosphere to speak of is because it cannot hold onto one for very long, because it doesn't have enough mass to hold onto one gravitationally and because it's cooled and hardened on the inside and that killed its magnetic field. Earth's magnetic field protects our atmosphere from the solar wind and cosmic rays, and virtually none of the solar wind gets through. Just a little at the poles as the Aurora Borealis, and that hits the Earth travelling straight down and so it doesn't eject atmospheric particles out into space so much. It is a misconception people have that it is protecting us directly, contrary to what you may have come to believe from watching the movie 'The Core'. In fact, Earth's magnetic field often drops to zero and reverses, and by often I mean over many thousands of years, and it hardly destroys all life on the planet. Even without a magnetic field, the atmosphere would protect us. What the Earth's magnetic field accomplishes is to protect the atmosphere, not us directly. Without it, the solar wind would smack into the atmosphere and like breaking up a table of billiard balls, they'd all go flying, they'd start escaping, and in a few million years, Earth would not have an atmosphere to speak of any more than Mars. And so, while it may be possible to artificially provide Mars with an atmosphere for a while and seed it with life, it is a short-term solution, because Mars is dead not only on the outside but on the inside too. So, could Mars be terraformed by the year 10000? Why not. Could Mars be terraformed slowly over 200 million years? Not without replenishing the whole planet's magnetic field, by say, maybe putting a superconducting current-carrying ring around its circumference. Because otherwise, over those 200 million years while you're doing it, the atmosphere would bleed away too fast, like a leaky bottle. It seems kind of counterintuitive at first. Normally, you'd expect things like that to work better if you give it more time, but that's one case where it would have to be done fast, over too small a scale of time for the air to be vanquished. Well, that's my say on the one real technical issue in the book. Like I said. No obvious flaws.
Book Review: good but some defects
Summary: 3 Stars
The story is quite simple and the writer separates them into two parts which causes a motive for readers to eager to know what happened and the connection between the two parts. And the problem is if either of them cannot sustain the strength but was turned into a tasteless plot, this kind arrangement would weaken the novel. At the final he gives us nothing but the time flow recombination. If we re-read it again but put them into a single time axis--put the present part after the past part--and I don't tell the huge different and dramatic effect except giving readers a puzzle of how it's going to be like this --yes, I circle back the origin I just said, and here we got the key: the truth is, the plot of present time is just a passage of not-so-hard struggling to the new world result from a abrupt reason the writer gives us hastily in the last few pages: they are hunted by government who wants to withdraws back the high-classified information including the documents and their bodies by violence and murder, and all of this doesn't astonish me much. Therefore, this flashback becomes a burdensome arrangement.
Despite the flashback, the story shows the excellent ability of the writer Robert Charles Wilson to tell a story. The clever work he made is to depict meticulously the world outside and inside the roles, and both are collapsing. He inserted each explosive incidents amid the whole progress in which he elaborated the mentalities of characters. So readers are dragged inside the story with the curiosity to know about the development of the mysterious Spin and its affections on people, the characters' emotions.
However, it also displays the shortages, the framework is good but the details are not as well. Robert molded some vivid face of person in certain aspect but lack the other sides and cause people possess some part looks reality truly but some others are vague. Ex: E.D., the father of Jason, many words to portray and sometimes I glimpse something more complicated than he seems ought to be in some pages but to the end he is not out of a certain frame. Even the leading character Tyler, the words in him still lack of comprehensiveness. Besides, about the influence that Spin brings to people, in some sections the writer gave a great description about the chaos and the helpless people, and the most important, what Spin affects characters, Tyler, Jason, and Diane. But in some other small sections, he didn't give a good reason in some subtleties for story logic. Especially there are some suspicious intentional simplifications for easy going. Ex: Sometimes I think it's sort of unnatural that Jason told Tyler so much.
But I have to say Robert definitely owns the ability shape the characters into more reality because he has given a touching and impressive narrative in some parts like the love between Tyler and Diane. And it's admirable that he puts so much effort to build a collapsing world and the people stepping to doomsday.
Though I criticize the incompleteness of characters and some odd fractional plots, I was moved by the interaction between the three people. Jason is a rationalist, and Diane is looking for her faith to confront the catastrophe. Tyler, sort of mind nothing but love, which is still hidden deep inside. Sometimes I think he's unpleasant, cold and cynical, but on the other hand, he is objective and get used to the Spin very well. He expresses apparently his emotions in the last to save Diane's life, and during the long way back to the origin, Big House, the plot is awesome, everything is collapsing, the Spin, the world, the civilization, as well as Simon's faith, Jason's life. At this part the stored energy about the fatal world and the lives since the Spin came is releasing.
I didn't talk about the science in the novel because it's no exceptional exciting ideas and I believe that's not the motif. Neither do I mention philosophy because it's not so profound to discuss too much, although the novel really has something to extract and discuss.
All in all, Robert made a good novel with some obvious defects which are following the excellence. And to improve it is the way to master. It's a story with SF background and inducing some thought, but the main subject is about humanity. After all, the core of a novel is always about people, the other is supposed to background.
Book Review: The story of three friends at the end of time - sooner than you'd think!
Summary: 4 Stars
Spin is basically the story of three friends growing up together. The brilliant Jason is being groomed as the heir to an aerospace empire. His sister Diane is almost as smart, but more philosophical and empathetic. Their housekeeper's son, Tyler, is a normal kid (although industrious enough to get into medical school) and the narrator of the action. Upon their world, when they are aged 12 or so, descends "the Spin." It is a membrane cutting mankind off from the rest of the universe, including their own sun, NASA's communications satellites, etc. Robert Charles Wilson's story is basically an apocalyptic one because outside the Spin membrane the universe is aging at an incredible rate - before the end of the natural lifetimes of the main characters, the sun will have expanded to its red giant state and engulfed the Earth. Thus, the race is on to determine the nature of the Spin membrane and the motives behind it. (Wilson does a clever thing - by naming the book and the membrane "Spin" he immediately wins over the skeptical physics types like me, who can readily accept the idea of time dilation through rotational motion as predicted by Relativity Theory and proven by experiment.)
Our characters grow up in the shadow of the Spin. Tyler has an unrequited love (or crush, at least) on Diane that he nurses through adolescence into adulthood. Diane chooses to deal with her species' coming mortality by finding religion (her father, a less understanding character, would call it a cult). Jason throws himself into finding out as much as he can about the nature of the Spin and some way to combat it. It turns out that mankind can traverse the membrane safely - thus, they send microbes and bacteria to start terraforming Mars. Located outside the Spin, time is moving at normal speed on Mars. Thus, within a year subjective time, Mars could become habitable (one hundred million years later in objective time).
That's all I'm going to say about the plot, because a dry description of the plot points is not really the point. The Spin is basically a McGuffin - a plot device to bring about crisis on Earth. Similar territory has been explored in science fiction using accelerated evolution ("Darwin's Radio," "Childhood's End"), an unstable sun going nova early ("Songs of Distant Earth"), even the coming of the Antichrist ("A Case of Conscience"). Even Tom Clancy's engineered ebola virus from Rainbow Six would have sufficed. Being a good sci fi book, we do eventually learn of the intelligence behind the membrane, and of its motives. But the point is mostly to bring an apocalyptic planetary crisis and to have our characters act out their parts in it.
Thus, at its heart, "Spin" is a story about human nature, and it's readable (and likeable) because it focuses on the characters and filters the action through their eyes. Told from the point of view of, say, a U.S. President, this story would not have been interesting. It's key that we like and identify with the characters. Granted, it's hard to identify with a genius like Jason after he's also become the nation's top power broker, but Wilson carefully builds up his character before he becomes that power broker, so we sympathise and even relate to him. In fact, I found Diane's character to be the hardest to believe - like most science fiction writers (exceptions: Sawyer and Card), Wilson seems to be uncomfortable with religion (or hostile to it) . His hard-core preacher pulling quotes from the Book of Revelations is convincing enough, but not his "free love" sect nor the participation of the thoughtful Diane (or even her less thoughtful but not gullible husband Simon) in such cults. This is the trait that drops the book from 5-star to 4-star level.
All in all, the book is certainly interesting, and a page-turner. Wilson uses the plot device of revealing the "present" alternating with the events leading up to it, and this device has never been used more effectively. Both the search for knowledge about the Spin, and the very human emotions and interactions behind the scenes, are engrossing, and the book is certainly deserving of its awards and accolades.
Book Review: The Stars Go Out! A complex, decades-spanning wonder of a novel!
Summary: 5 Stars
Spin is a remarkable novel told skillfully in prose that is clean and well-crafted and that frequently rises to a place of stunning vividness and beauty. I give Wilson credit for using utterly perfect metaphors. Sometimes--you know how it is--you're reading and a metaphor is so odd or jarring that it stops you cold, sometimes with a grimace. Not Wilson. He is in complete charge of his sentences. When they rise, they do so effortlessly and when they descend, you're left a little breathless for a second. Gorgeous.
He also does not sacrifice characterization in the pursuit of scientific dazzle or cute ideas. He handles both the science plot and his engaging, sympathetic (and even less sympathetic) characters with depth and nimbleness. They are not perfect people, but they are good and needy and terrified. And they are believable.
I am avocado with envy.
The plot and allusions are smartly handled at the wikipedia entry, and plenty of synopses are available in reviews on this site, so I'll let you get the plot summaries elsewhere. I'll give the core of it: It's a story that follows three protagonists who watch the stars go out one night in their adolescence, and their long journey together (and apart) to discover the why and what and who, even as they deal in their own ways with a looming apocalypse. The scientist, the religious zealot (sorta), and the doctor-friend who loves them both and is in love with one form the story's central triangle of characterization.
I will add that there is a character who becomes involved with Christian cults/sects as a response to the astonishing inciting incident of the novel. While Christians are hardly pictured as heroic or admirable in the novel--the scientist is the hero here--there is also not the utter cheap shooting that one comes across now and then in secular SF/horror/etc, where ministers are all abusing or raping someone and religious folks are nutters who want to whip their kids into a blood sausage between picketing gays and grubbing for money. (serenity now...serenity now...) There is a certain sympathy that is shown to people so frightened and seeking for meaning and "an answer" that they fall into weird religious sects (or even not-so-weird ones). I wasn't terribly put off by the depiction of Christians as mostly deluded but well-meaning (it's what I expect from secularists) or just plain useless and naive, if cheerful. At least we're not all out to lynch the scientists and burn the Martians. (One takes one's consolation where one can.)
A really beautifully done novel where the threads of the various plots are woven seamlessly and the flashing back and forth in time is handled with such aplomb that you are not lost in transits. Not once.
A great premise. Three strongly drawn protagonists (and some well-done secondary characters). Believable conflicts. Believable extrapolations (meaning even if you--or I--aren't up on our science we can believe that these actions are feasible and yield results). Complicated human relationships. Action and suspense. Some romance. Good dialogue. A sense of wonder at the cosmos. This story merited its HUGO AWARD.
The ending is uplifting and magical, even, though this is real science fiction and not a fantasy novel. I think any of you who picks up SPIN will find quite a lot to enjoy, even if science fiction is not your usual cup of tea. The human drama is so compelling that lovers of good, dramatic general fiction will have a grand time.
If you want to study a novel to see how to handle shifts in time and a complex plot that works out through various decades, to learn how to weave in science in interesting ways that relate to character, to make a looming apocalypse seem more than an occasion for over-the-top heroes and hysteria--or flat prose and ho-hum protagonists--then read this with an analytical eye.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.