Book Review: Spin

Title: Spin
Author: Robert Charles Wilson
Reviewed Format: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 452
Rating: 4 1/2 Stars

Review: Spin is a Hugo Award for Best Novel winning sci-fi novel by Robert Charles Wilson.  For all intents and purposes the story is set now... Or maybe more accurately in 2005, when it was written.  It is written in the first-person (with one Tyler Dupree as the narrator) and follows the story of three main characters.  A pair of twins, Diane and Jason Lawton are children of relative privilege and both almost certainly geniuses.  Our narrator, no cognitive slouch himself, grows up in the shadow of these powerful personalities.  Robert Charles Wilson adroitly explores the personality of an individual who finds themselves in a position supporting (both directly and indirectly) a person of great influence who happens to have been alive at just that time that would see them maximize their potential impact.

That "just that time" is how Spin sets itself apart.  An ingenious scientific what-if.  It's a novel written in the great tradition of Isaac Asimov, or maybe even more so, Arthur C. Clarke.  Robert Charles Wilson has the three characters as teens making a bit of mischief during an adult party being thrown in the twins' house.  While they stand in the backyard looking up at the sky, suddenly the stars blink out.  It turns out that something has constructed a sort of temporal membrane around the Earth.  Inside that membrane time appears to be passing normally, while outside of it (the rest of the universe) things are moving at a rate of several years for every earth second.  The reason this has happened is completely unclear.  The story spans the next thirty or forty years (Earth-time) and we watch as society and our main characters try to adapt to this new reality.

This novel is purely excellent sci-fi.  It creates a canvas with a significant change to our reality and then paints a dramatic scene with compelling three-dimensional characterization and a psychological deep dive on those characters.  Wilson is a good writer, and I think this book would be accessible to any adult audience as a result.  I would recommend this book to anyone, fans of sci fi or otherwise.  (4 1/2 stars)