Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson has written several novels in which something large and inexplicable happen to the earth. In Darwinia, Europe vanishes and is replaced by an alien landscape. In The Chronoliths, strange monolithic structures begin appearing in various parts of the world. Now, in Spin, the earth is suddenly enclosed in a membrane that slows down time on earth, such that many hundreds of years pass in the rest of the universe for each year on earth.

Like all of Wilson’s books, the main characters of Spin are well drawn and interesting. The main character, Tyler Dupree, is doctor and the son of a woman who, when Tyler was growing up, the on-site housekeeper for E. D. Lawton, a politically savvy and influential industrialist. Tyler is close friends with Lawton’s two children: the brilliant and driven Jason (who his father views as his heir, but also seeks to control) and Diane, who is also bright, but can be flakey (and whom Tyler has been attached to since childhood). One day, while the three kids are outside, the stars go out. Jason’s reaction, strengthened over time, is curiosity and the scientific attempt to find meaning in what comes to be called the Spin. Diane becomes religious – or wants to, anyway – and becomes attached to one of the religious groups that pops up in response to the Spin. Tyler, who is also the narrator, hovers between the two.

The novel combines interesting extrapolation with a good story, as Jason and humanity in general react to the Spin – and to the fact that time is slowed down so much on earth that, if things don’t change, within the lifetimes of many now alive the sun will have swelled to the earth’s orbit (billions of years in the universes future, if only 50 or so on earth’s). Humanity tries a number of things to solve the problem – including terraforming Mars robotically and then sending humans there to live. (After all, even if terraforming takes a million years, that’s more like a year earth time [Wilson works out that times better than I’m conveying here; I just haven’t gone back to the book to look for the exact numbers], and the human civilization we seed on Mars can spend more time developing in a year earth time than humans have already spent on their civilization on earth.

It’s a good novel and comes to a more satisfying conclusion than either Darwinia or The Chronoliths (both of which I liked but both of which left me feeling a bit let down at the end). Wilson is a major novelist who has now had several books nominated for the Hugo. But he seems to be our least talked about, most hidden major novelist. He deserves more attention.