Spin

By: Robert Charles Wilson

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

One night when he was 10, Tyler stood in his backyard and watched the stars go out. They flared into brilliance, then disappeared, replaced by an empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The "sun" is now a featureless disk - a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. The world's artificial satellites have fallen out of orbit. Eventually, space probes reveal that the barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time passes faster outside the barrier - more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death of the sun is only about forty years away.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines, then humans, to Mars...and immediately an emissary returns with thousands of stories about the settling of Mars. Then an identical barrier appears around Mars.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

©2005 Robert Charles Wilson (P)2008 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

• Hugo Award, Best Novel, 2006

"Wilson continues to surprise and delight. I can't think of another science fiction writer who understands the strengths of the genre so well and who works with such confidence within its elastic boundaries." (The New York Times)
"The best science fiction novel so far this year." (Rocky Mountain News)

Its great!

I loved this book. I'm sad that its over!

Good book but too slow

I enjoyed the story and I love the idea of it. I look forward to more in the series. But the pace was really plodding and the characters were annoyingly moppy. Hopefully the events of this book make them more likable in future books.

So good!

Very imaginative and engrossing. I devoured this one. I can see why it won the Hugo award.

Inventive story and good prose for hard sci-fi

I thought the story was excellent I was invested in the outcome and had no idea where it was going (in a good way). My only criticism would be the narrator and the inflection seems to be overboard on being poignant and morose, even though it is tonally (mostly) congruent with the mood of the story.

Lots of fiction, wanted more science

The main science fiction idea behind the story was meted out piece by careful piece throughout the story. I found this a little frustrating since I like there to be more science, or at least enough science to not notice the lack of it. The story happening around the science was only mildly interesting to me, but I also just finished reading highly dramatic spy novels, so others may enjoy the leisurely pace of the story which centers around 50 years of unrequited love. There was one twist in the story that I liked about halfway through and then the science fiction aspects of the story picked up to take me through the rest of the story. Until then, I could have set the story down at any time.

I loved it.

Spin is an awesome story. It contains fascinating speculative fiction and is delivered with brilliant narration. The best sci-fi I've encountered since Cloud Atlas.

Worth the credit

Loved the story and the narration. Even if sci-fi is not your thing, this book is worth a listen. I recommended it to a few friends who all typically hate the idea of sci-fi and the ones who decided to give it a try loved it. The concept that Wilson comes up with is so imaginative and at the same time eerily plausible.

Brilliant premise but poor character development

We meet the narrator at age 12 and spend the entire book with pining for his childhood girlfriend. Probably with dreams to live in a treehouse.

All the Elements

I loved listening to this book. The narrator adds great color to the charaters and the story is one of a kind. If your a fan of SciFi I must insist you download Spin along with Axis immediately.
All the Elements are in these books.

Meh

Premise was interesting but the characters were not. It was entertaining, but definitely isn't gonna stick with me.