Excessive Candour
Take a Break

Robert Charles Wilson has been doing this for quite a while. Almost a decade ago, in a review of his eighth book, Darwinia, I said he was maybe the primary creator of what one might call the belljar novel: the tale set in a world within a larger world which is unreachable.

It is a very Canadian way of understanding the geography of reality (William Gibson's version of cyberspace is probably the most famous example of the dynamic at work), and Wilson's novels to date have almost routinely been set in such pocket worlds: worlds which are gazed upon. These are worlds whose noses are pressed against the glass, and unsurprisingly the deepest longing of Wilson's protagonists—a longing which is sometimes granted, though never without strings—is to emigrate: emigration being a very Canadian way to get real.

But it is more than that. Wilson novels are thought experiments conducted by others, but these experiments are conducted with a gunmetal precision typical of very few hard-SF novels (he is never braggart, and he never gives masonical handshakes to the guys destined to figure out the puzzles); and their plots rigorously expose the costs of exogamy longing, i.e., the anxious sense that full selfhood will only be gained when you reach the Promised Land, whose air may be unbreathable.

His ingenuity at exfoliating these patterns of story into tales of considerable interest should have been enough, long ago, to have gained him a Hugo, the big gong for hard-SF books that earn out; but it may be that the dry-ice silence of his work—Dionysus does not exactly frolic through these pages—has been too off-putting. So it was a welcome surprise when he finally got a Hugo for Spin, the 2005 novel to which Axis is an exemplary sequel. In a way, Spin is pure Wilson with oxygen. There is the sudden imposition of a belljar over the world, and there is a dysfunctional family group to refract the costs of imprisonment, the heavy burden Wilson lays on his protagonists: live it or leave it.

Trapped inside a cosmic belljar

The first sentence of the second chapter of Spin puts it pretty succinctly: "I was twelve, and the twins were thirteen, the night the stars disappeared from the sky." Over the very considerable length of Spin, we gradually home in on what may have happened, and why. An ancient interstellar "culture" of self-replicating machines here known as the Hypotheticals—I believe Wilson refers to them as Von Neumann Machines—has evolved over eons into an information network pretty well isomorphous with reality; whether or not this network embodies or serves as chariot for an overall intelligence is never determined, though Wilson's rendering of this network very much resembles the rendering of the non-intelligent alien "civilization" in Peter Watts' Blindsight (2006). It is this entity which encloses the Earth within a membrane that blocks out the stars and transfigures the passage of time inside so that millions of years pass in the universe for every year humans experience on Earth. By the time the "Spin" is lifted, several decades up the line, the universe is nearing heat death.

Why the Spin is imposed, and why it is lifted, remain mysteries—mysteries which are not later solved in Axis, which is a true (and superlatively crafted) second volume of a trilogy. Radical transformations of life on Earth are referred to, but distantly—it is inherent in Wilson's design that the narrator of Spin, Tyler Dupree, who views much of the action from the sidelines, is dysfunctional somewhere along the Asperger/autism spectrum (Wilson states this outright), his incapacity to quite get human interactions conveys an entirely appropriate chill of trauma between him and the twins, one of whom he loves, one of whom is a extraordinarily well-conceived genius who longs with all his high heart to penetrate the mysteries of the new cosmology he's been thrust into. Tyler's numbed narrative is a triumph of imperception, and also conveys, perhaps better than any Dos Passos passagework (which by now we've seen before lots), a cognate dysfunctionality afflicting the world as a whole, for human civilization is clearly spinning its wheels, hamstrung from time, beating wings against the glass.

Spin ends in a migration of sorts—there is always exogamy in a Wilson novel—across a Hypothetical-constructed magic-science arch between Earth and a planet which seems to have been groomed, over millennia, for our arrival. And that's the last we see of Tyler, except for memories. Axis starts three decades later with a new cast. The human settlers in Equatoria—not its proper name, but everyone calls it that—have created a culture rather like colonial Australia: bumptious, craven, corrupt, open-hearted and deeply ambivalent about the desert which seems to occupy the interior. One doesn't want to be cruel about Australia (as a Canadian, I figure I can say what I want about my native land), but it is very clear that by setting Axis in a land very much like Australia Wilson has very neatly underlined the fact that there is going to have to be a sequel.

The pleasure of taking it easy

What is remarkable about Axis is that, though very little actually happens over its moderate length (it's 60 pages shorter than Spin, and very much more generously set), there is a pleasure in taking it kind of easy in Equatoria that maybe only an author as deeply and securely professional as Wilson could convey. There is an abortive attempt (or, if not abortive, we won't know it's not abortive till next volume) to create a kind of Kwisach Haderach (or next best thing), which does require a bit more backstory to understand, but let's be quick: in Spin, Mars is terraformed by Earth, a process which takes only two Earth years, though millennia outside the semi-permeable membrane of the bell-jar; a Martian visits, passes on to science hero-twin a medicament which will turn adult humans into Fourths, long-lived mature human stock who are kindly but austere; he also passes on a supplemental drug which may enable the user to tune in to the Hypotheticals; but the drug kills the science hero-twin.

In Axis, a more successful attempt is mounted, though the transformed child is not much good at social interaction. The plot boils softly around this axis. The American Genomic Security runs roughshod over the laws of the United Nations concord which ostensibly governs Equatoria, and attempts to eliminate the lad, as his very existence violated genomic purity (there is quite a bit of religion in both volumes, to the description of whose strictures Wilson devotes the only pages in his hundreds of thousands of words so far which seem tedious). A young woman attempts to find out if her father abandoned her 12 years earlier, or was rendered by Genomic Security. A character from the previous book does good work as a nurse in the wilderness. A Martian woman attempts to persuade a covey of Fourths against going ahead with the inhumane and inhuman communication project. There is a love affair (extremely chastely described); and local colour; and bad weather; and deaths. And young Kwisach glows with hemi-demi-transcendental communion just as the book ends. We still know next to nothing about the reason for everything.

It all sounds like sand in the eyes, but does not so read—partly because Wilson has become a master at the integration of macro and micro story levels, which (as I said a moment ago) refract each other modestly and winningly, an interplay which in this volume continues to generate a sort of musing upon content genuinely pleasant to absorb; and partly because he trusts his readers enough not to disguise the fact that Axis Relaxa is a bridge.

There will be caterwauling in the cosmos soon enough.