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)

Great Great Great

Ah I was needing a great SciFi book and this one is woven so nicely. Wonderful listen. I am sad the book is over.

Very Entertaining

Honestly, I wonder about reviewers that download Sci-Fi titles yet apparently are not interested in the genre.

I really enjoyed this book and found it to be very fast moving. In fact, I had a lot of driving to do and listened straight through in the course of a couple days.

If you pay attention to the story, the movement from one time period to the other is effortless and effective. It is not at all confusing.

I really enjoyed this title and will look for more from this author. As usual, Scott Brick was amazing. Mr. Brick is by far my favorite reader.

Clever central idea, but story lifeless, dull

The central concept will pique the interest of any speculative fiction fan: Earth is one day mysteriously enveloped in a field that drastically slows our time relative to other planets in the system, and this allows us to cause and witness billions of years of terraformed development of life on Mars, perceived on Earth over a period of only days, weeks, a year.

Unfortunately the author props this concept up on characters that are unlikable and shallow, with nothing to keep us interested in them. The main protagonist is a nebbish so empty and characterless that it's like a grey space where a person should be. One of the other main characters is like a cartoon of the smartest child genius ever, who also happens to have intimate access to privileged data at the highest levels of government secrecy. But we don't even get to like him, he is kept aloof. The only character that has some humanity is the genius's sister, who struggles with faith in the face of apocalypse; but even she is given a terribly shallow treatment, portrayed mostly as an indecisive whiner with no self agency.

On top of all this half-hearted hand-wringing by characters we don't care about, the reader himself whines. His voice is annoying. His whiny tone would sound sardonic or wry if the content of what he read was itself sardonic or wry, but instead what he's reading is this lifeless exercise in drawing out a speculative science concept. And he does very little to differentiate between characters. The first syllable of a line will have some character voice, but immediately thereafter it's all in the same whiny man's monotone.

All in all, I couldn't even finish it. I tried, I liked the central concept enough to give it chance after chance to pick up steam and become what it could be, and got most of the way through the book, but it became too tedious and annoying to actually bother reaching the end.

Interesting concept - that lost me

I'd have given it 3.5 if I could. This book had an engrossing concept from the start that ultimately gets down to "what happens when everyone thinks the world will end very soon". The characters are interesting and engaging, and there are some interesting twists - I enjoyed, even though I never read sci-fi. The ending however left something to be desired - and didn't really answer the questions I thought it would (or at least if it did - I didn't get it).

Really great apocalyptic read focused on curiosity

Good narrative, great story, awesome concept and fulfiling. Hard to out down, when it picks up it gets going. Lots of twists.

Decent book

The story wasn't the best I had ever heard, but it did keep my attention. The narrator was a bit dull and that didn't make for an exciting telling of the story.

Big ideas, poor character development

First: I did like this book. The big idea carried it but it seems that the character development was more of a distraction then an addition to the story. this might've been a better book to read when you're able to skip over sections and jump more to core story elements. With that being said I would recommend the book as Big ideas of the spin were definitely thought-provoking.

Great sci-fi!

This is a great sci-fi book. The feel of it reminded me of "Ender's Game" which I loved and have listened to twice. I was thoroughly engrossed througout the story. Only once or twice did it seem like it meandered a bit, but overall it was a great listen.

Spin

I enjoyed the story, especially toward the end as things unfolded. My big complaint is that the story is WAAAYYY too long, thus 4 stars.

Loved it!

I was in the mood for a Scott Brick narration so I searched him on Audible and came across this. Sounded interesting so I gave it a try. Fantastic Sci-fi! I will definitely be listening to the rest of the trilogy!

If you've ever listened to or read the Bobiverse trilogy by Dennis E. Taylor and narrated by Ray Porter, you'll enjoy this. There are only a few similarities. This almost gave me a sense of how an alien race, new to us, would feel upon first encounter with one of the Bobs. One of the Bobs that tried to keep himself unknown to the planet of course. And of course Spin's strange aliens, if you want to call them that, are what seem to be sentient Von Neumann probes, like the Bobs.

Fantastic story so far. Robert Charles Wilson is new to me but I'll definitely be listening to the rest of this series and checking out some of his other work as well. Scott Brick isn't new to me obviously since he was the reason I picked this book. He is one of the absolute best narrators!