Spin
by Robert Charles Wilson
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Book Reviews of Spin
Book Review: Spin... when you really NEED a billion years for life to evolve on Mars...
Summary: 4 Stars
I tackled this story backwards.
First, I read Axis. Spin came later. This cleared up some Axis-related questions for me, and I read Spin with an anticipation of getting to know who some of those Fourths really were.
I happen to like the "terraforming Mars" genre of sci-fi. Whether it is Bradbury's tales, Mission to Mars, Kim Stanley Robinsons' "colored Mars" trilogy, or others, I admit my fascination with living on Mars. There is always that issue of just how long this process would take. After all, Earth's ecosystems didn't arise in a thousand years!
Author Charles Wilson found a neat way to solve this problem.
Earth is inexplicably put into a "cocoon", a barrier or membrane that regulates the solar energy hitting the earth and, well, slows down time relative to the rest of the galaxy. A second on Earth, if memory serves me correctly, equals 3.17 years elsewhere. A day on Earth, and Saturn has aged a quarter of a million years. In 5 years, Mars ages a half a billion years.
People realize that, in a normal lifetime, the Sun will age and expand to a point where human life is not sustainable. This affects our social fabric in interesting ways.
It also means that the attempt to terraform Mars happens in a decade. With Mars modified to have a breathable atmosphere and emergent vegetation, the human settlers blast off to colonize this new world. In one of the most striking examples of the time differential, one spaceship blasted off 10 minutes later than the others. When this 10 minute late ship arrives on Mars, the other colonists will have been living on Mars for 10,000 years.
Wow. There is much more to this story, so I don't want the reader to think that I just gave away the plot.
I had the luxury of reading Axis first (the second book in this series). However, if I didn't read it, I think I would have been irked by the ending, just like I was irked by the ending of Axis. There is a trick in meshing book one with book two and book three. Either the books make it as stand alone novels, or they clearly depend on each other. Spin and Axis fall somewhere in-between. With that said, I will be on the lookout for book number three. I mean, Mars is now under a membrane, as are a few other planets in the galaxy. Axis focuses more on who is doing this (the "Hypotheticals"). In book three, I expect Martians to play a role, I expect the Hypotheticals to expose themselves a little (prediction - humans have played a role in the development of these technologies), and I think Fourths will become a major societal force, unless the Martians now have developed a "Fifth."
Fun reading. Enjoy.
Book Review: Brigadoon Meets Armageddon
Summary: 3 Stars
The underlying science fiction premise in this book is a good one. The earth is somehow cocooned so that while time passes at what seems a normal speed, outside the cocoon time is racing by so that billions of years are passing outside over a thirty- or forty-year period inside and those who understand what is going on foresee the eventual end of earth in a dying sun. Set against this is the tale of three friends from the time of the cocooning to the end of the novel. The first is the scientist who leads the effort to deal with the problem; the second is his sister who becomes affiliated with religious cults; and the third is the doctor who is confidant and physician to the scientist and who pines for the sister. The story is told in the first person from the doctor's point of view.
The story had the potential to be quite good, showing how the cataclysmic events affect the three principals and illuminating society's response to difficult situations. The author uses a lot of foreshadowing of events, by intimating tragedies to come, and by telling the story of the events in a series of flashbacks.
Stories told in the first person by a participant usually offer an intriguing way into a plot by revealing the narrator's character and personality and showing us how these relate to the story line. Unfortunately, the narrator is a stiff, and as a result turns a potential adventure into a boring tale. The brother and sister are stick figures who go through the story without ever revealing much about them selves. Moreover, the writer's language does little to move the story along. For example one of the main characters, who writes a letter while on the lam, says "I've effected my escape." Who talks like that? People wanting to move along quickly say "I escaped." I really didn't care what happened to any of these figures and kept reading to find out what the cocooning was about. I also should have known after this tremendous premise, any denouement was bound to be anti-climactic. Still, if I had cared about the characters, this would have been acceptable.
Another annoying habit of the author was what I presume was an attempt to get us to identify with the main characters by regularly using street names or product names from the world we live in today. Unfortunately, I just said to myself, "I know that place" without feeling any more involved in the story line.
Still the underlying premise was a great one, and the techniques for dealing with the problems created by the cocooning ingenious. That almost made the book worth reading.
Book Review: An unusual crossover
Summary: 4 Stars
I have not cared for Robert Charles Wilson's prior books. They struck me as essentially mainstream literary fiction with science-fictional trappings. His resolutions, in particular, have often been profoundly anticlimactic.
_Spin_ is, for all intents and purposes, a mainstream/SF crossbreed. Rather to my surprise, it works pretty well. Wilson is getting better at making his scientific speculation as good as his characterization and psychological insight already are.
The book is really two separate though intertwined stories. The mainstream dramatic story is about the complex emotional lives of narrator Tyler Dupree and the Lawton family. The science-fiction story is about the "Spin" field that envelops the Earth, blanking out the stars and changing the planet--indeed, the solar system--in unimaginable ways.
The two plots coexist well enough. They don't really depend crucially on one another; if you split Tyler Dupree into two characters, you might be able to turn _Spin_ into two completely separate books. In part this is because Tyler is a passive observer, not an actor. On the mainstream side of the book, he mostly waits for his thwarted love interest to telephone him. On the SF side, he does what he's told, and provides a convenient sounding board for Brilliant Scientist(TM) Jason Lawton. Indeed, the SF plot is basically a series of infodumps. Even the climax is an infodump.
But these are very *interesting* infodumps. Not 100% original--[MINOR SPOILER] see, for example, David Brin's "The Crystal Spheres" [END MINOR SPOILER]--but fascinatingly developed, with some brilliant yet logical scientific twists. This is not a fast-paced action-oriented story, but it keeps moving due to the force of cumulative revelation.
The literary half of _Spin_ is perhaps more polished, and is pretty satisfying as well; Tyler is forced to make the transition from looker-on to doer, and to grapple with some very difficult psychological terrain. I especially appreciate Wilson's ability to write characters who don't agree with his protagonist, but who are still (at least somewhat) sympathetic.
If Wilson ever manages to really tightly integrate his mainstream sensibilities and his science-fiction ideas, he may produce something spectacular. As it is, _Spin_ is a surprisingly successful hybrid. It should appeal both to readers who like character-driven inward-looking drama and to readers who like large-scale idea-driven scope. That's no mean feat.
Book Review: The spin is slowing, slowing, stopping....
Summary: 3 Stars
This book spins up to a ferocious level of interest, a compelling story. The tale of three people living on this Earth when a barrier suddenly arrives, cutting off the world, is written with a friendly opening that brings the reader on board, up to speed, and off into a compelling story.
Which slows to a halt over the next 400 pages.
The problem is the lead character, who is uninteresting, and is mostly a device to allow the author to follow two more compelling friends, who are siblings. Their reaction to the "spin" is more interesting, the brother who attacks the problem with science, the sister who passively retreats into marriage and religion. The main character follows these two, with a foot in each camp, but cannot seem to care much about himself, or make us care...
As the story slows, the truth becomes clear. The barrier is placed by (SPOILER ALERT) the Hypotheticals, who turn out to be a series of self-replicating intelligent machines that populate the Galaxy. They place the barrier to "save the biological networks".
The barrier allows the Earth to live 50 years while the Universe lives billions. This is designed to prevent humans from destroying themselves as resources wane. The staggering illogic here is destructive of the enjoyment of the book.
* The barrier essentially gives humanity 50 years to get its act straight, while the Universe spends billions of years and the sun slowly dies. Would it not be more sensible to give humanity billions of years, while the Universe ages 50?
* The Hypotheticals have access to huge amounts of energy, enough to solve mankind's needs, but share none. They have huge stocks of information, and share none. They could explain their actions, even with putative limits of machine intelligence, but instead say nothing. The barrier forms, and man struggles and that is it. The result is death on earth, and an unfocused response by man. This is sold at the end as a sort of favor by the Hypotheticals to mankind, but is rather more of a plot device by the author to give mystery to his aliens.
Later books in what appears to be a series may re-explain this, and explain it better. The problem is that by the end of this book, the spin of good story telling has slowed, the interest in characters waned, the story grown stale, the mystery of the Hypotheticals rendered noxious, and the desire to spend $8 for a sequel has ground to a halt.
Book Review: A Brilliantly Crafted Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
"Spin" is a very well written novel that follows the lives of three characters, Tyler Dupree, Jason Lawton, and Jason's sister Diane, as they grow up and live in the era of an enigmatic crisis in which a technologically advanced device nicknamed "Spin" has entrapped Earth in a way that could very easily destroy the planet. The story jumps back and forth between these past events, which are narrated by Tyler, and the present, where Tyler is married to Diane and is trying to write this book. In the present, Tyler and Diane are in a foreign country, running and hiding from just about everyone in the world, including the U.S. government, who think they are dangerous criminals on a global scale.
Robert Charles Wilson does a great job developing his characters, adding layers of depth to each one as the story progresses. Spin is filled with metaphors and symbolism which have monumental affects on each character as the world falls onto the brink of anarchy and destruction. There are a lot of questions brought up as the plot progresses, and it seemed like almost every time one was answered, another one or two questions would come up. These and other events make the story more and more chaotic, but it is gradually woven together, and by the end all the loose ends are wrapped up nicely. By then, we feel so relieved for the characters who've manage to escape from their enemies after a long and difficult journey, but we can't help but wonder what will happen to them next. That helps pave the way for the sequel, which is called "Axis."
If there's one problem I had, it's that there were a few scenes throughout the book in the chapters narrated by Tyler that seemed to drag on and slow the plot a little too much. This would sometimes dampen the apocalyptic suspense and it could make readers feel tempted to skip a few pages to see what would happen next. I think 4.5 stars would be a more accurate rating because of that, but since that's not an option I decided to round up because of the high quality of Wilson's writing in both the first and third person and the depth of the characters and the plot.
Overall, "Spin" is a very well structured post-apocalyptic novel that's filled with unexpected twists and turns. It's a very intriguing and sometimes suspenseful story that focuses more on the characters and the plot than on the action and the science fiction elements. That's how sci-fi novels should be written.