Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Spin is Robert Charles Wilson's Hugo Award-winning masterpiece―a stunning combination of a galactic "what if" and a small-scale, very human story.
 

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his backyard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, 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 effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk―a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, a space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside―more than a hundred million years per year on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.
 

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 new religion out of the fears of the masses.
 

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans… and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun―and report back on what they find.
 

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

Picked up on a blind Goodreads algorithm suggestion (dangerous choice, I know), I had no expectations or experience going into Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin. Obviously I assumed it would be at least competently plotted with a high-concept as the coveted 2006 Hugo Award winner for best novel. What I did not expect and was pleasantly surprised by was the highly restrained, nuanced, yet incredibly character work that carried me all through Spin. This is notable particularly when some of the science-fiction elements, pardon the bad pun, occasionally spun a bit out of control. A 4.5 rounded up, this rating is not necessarily a rating for a fun or entertaining time, but for a rating that respects the quality of the writing and the execution of the story. Some of my 5-star reads are entertaining or a thrill ride to read; Spin is slower and smart one that I know will stick with me for a while.

The main plot of Spin asks the age-old question, what happens when a potentially catastrophic, maybe even apocalyptic event occurs? When faced with possibility that the end of the world is ending, how do people react and grapple with their impending death? (a possibility with no exact end date/time). Spin’s answer to that question is its three main characters and childhood friends. Siblings Jason and Diane Lawton view their lives and the world’s impending end in two different ways. Jason becomes a visionary scientist and an industry prodigy, aspiring to discover the root cause of the Spin and the greater purpose for the unusual phenomenon. Diane turns to religion (or a form of freeform spirituality), living as a recluse and nomad amongst others who look to a higher power to ease their anxieties and mortality. And for some like the main protagonist Tyler Dupree, childhood friend who lives on the Lawton’s property (his mother works as the Lawton’s housekeeper), life just goes on and you roll with unexpected and usual thrown your way.

What was immediately obvious to me from the get-go was Spin’s commitment and return to old-school, classic sci-fi. In recent years, I’ve often felt like the genre has moved heavily towards futuristic, high-concept, far-flung technology-based narratives that are entirely otherworldly. Instead of futuristic themes, Spin’s sci-fi flavor is a refreshing return to the classic fiction based on speculative science in the near future. Exploration of the event later referred to as the “Spin” and its world include technology and concepts that are plausible, applying real theories including Von Neumann probes, terrestrial colonization and terraforming (with rough scientific methods to achieve it), and the use of high-altitude balloons as an alternative to satellite technology. Technological advances to cure certain conditions like cancer today are developed in real-time while new diseases and conditions are introduced that are grounded with real world parallels. The fictional in-universe CVWS disease humans catch from infected bovine is essentially a form of coronavirus, except a bacterial version (coronaviruses are RNA viruses by definition) well before they obviously became more well-known in recent years. Despite being published in 2005, Spin feels like a modern classic that I would’ve expected in the late 80’s or 90’s (apart from the inspired technology that didn’t exist back then).

While the book’s synopsis entirely focuses on describing the unusual astronomical event referred to as the Spin where all the stars in the sky go out (a compelling story hook and mystery), the actual story focuses on Tyler, Jason and Diane’s lives and they are affected by the post-Spin society. And while Spin showcases its science fiction content when the story focuses on the cause of the Spin, for me the novel was at its best when it focused on these three childhood friends. The description feels like a misnomer as nearly all of the book is devoted to how the three of them go in and out of each other’s lives. In many ways the first two thirds of Spin reminded me of the character work featured in Gabrielle Zevin’s contemporary novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, sharing the grounded and realistic portrayal of friends aging in life. People come and go, relationships and beliefs are always changing, yet true life friends or soulmates will pick things up as if time never passed (I particularly loved Tyler and Jason’s dynamic).

Spin’s character work is slow, nuanced, and incredibly well done. I don’t know if I can coherently put into words how well-executed it is, but I’m going to try anyway. As character, Tyler is a quiet and introspective narrator voice that felt perfectly comfortable, nearly close to my own personality. Restrained emotions, no reckless outbursts or spontaneous actions, Spin’s tone and pacing felt perfectly catered to me. I can see some readers finding it needlessly slow or wordy, but that in itself was a quality that I appreciated. Despite being long and Tyler’s life meandering, the story is quite tight and devoid of unnecessary emotional or plot-related distractions. The deliberate pacing makes the passage of time feel believable since the story encompasses the three characters from age 12 through adulthood in their 40’s or so. I also liked the consistency of each character’s personality coupled with their evolving psyche and dialogue. I often find books that cover life journeys lack the execution at believably portraying their characters at different stages of their lives (big pet peeve is adult characters behaving or thinking like juveniles).

Outside of the three core characters, the rest of the characters are also well-developed. While some are clearly intended to be viewed negatively for narrative purposes, Spin is written in a way that there’s no true villain which I always find interesting. Despite some subtle dark humor jabs at religious zealot or conservative thinkers, there’s no good/bad portrayals or any type of morale judgement. RCW does a great job at portraying a wide variety of individuals all with varying goals or opinions on the Spin who are just trying to live life their way, one way or another. In particular, the character of Carol Lawton’s descent and recovery with alcoholism and her relationship with husband E.D. Lawton (Jason and Diane’s parents) were far more developed and stronger than expected (the last few chapters were especially a highlight).

Spin generally does a great job at balancing science vs spirituality represented by Jason and Diane’s life choices. However, the plot gets a little random and out of hand about two thirds of the way in. Aspects relating to Diane’s religion started to feel random and out of left field (which partly makes sense in-universe mimicking cult-like tendencies that commonly are also odd) which also coincides with the science fiction elements getting a bit out there in Jason’s arc. The science part of the science fiction elements was generally quite accessible, but it goes quite hard and technical out of the blue. Perhaps my relative inexperience with more hardcore sci-fi works was a factor, but this part of the story wasn’t my favorite, though the strong character work at least carried me through it. This was also made more noticeable by the sudden crunch of plot and info overloading in the last 60 pages. The last three chapters serve as an epilogue concluding the main storyline that also bridges the past events Tyler narrates with the present time events marked 4 X 10⁹ A.D.; these chapters were excellent. However, the concluding chapters leading up to it felt like they could’ve easily been another 50-100 pages. For how well-paced and meticulous the story was written, this sudden info-dumping in two chapters felt uncharacteristically rough and out of place both in pacing and the manner in which they were revealed. On the bright side, Spin’s ending is decisive and ties up all plot threads cleanly. Despite being part of a trilogy, each book’s narrative is self-contained. One can read Spin standalone and still walkaway with a complete reading experience as Axis and Vortex each have separate narratives that only share the same “universe” of sort.

Despite minor reservations about a small chunk of the plot, overall Spin really lives up to its Hugo award status and was a very pleasant surprise. The character work was nuanced and one of the most well-executed narratives I’ve read lately in general, let alone within the sci-fi genre which I usually find to be plot/action first, character story second. Although the hardcover copy I read comes in at only 364 pages, the characters’ journeys and the amount of content and time covered in the material felt easily double that number (and not just because the font size is smaller than the norm). An incredibly dense and very well-written read, this took me a while to finish and is not something I would recommend to everyone. Namely RCW novels are very light on “action” (Spin has debatably no action at all) and the dialogue is subtle, requiring the reader to read between the lines (I laughed on more than one occasion at Jason’s lowkey, implied jabs at shallow and empty-headed people). However, for readers who may not necessarily like the science fiction genre but appreciate a strong character story and of course for sci-fi fans, Spin is worthy of its new classic label. A good test read is the first 30-40 pages. If the tone and pacing is bland or boring to you, it’s probably a good idea not to continue (meanwhile I was thoroughly invested, if you can make me care about 12yr old kids, you’ve done a great job).