welve-year-old Tyler Dupree is stargazing with Jason and Diane Lawton, the 13-year-old twins who are his best friends, when the impossible occurs: The stars ... wink out. One minute they're twinkling as usual in the night sky; the next they're gone, and the sky is as empty and dark as the depths of a cave. Before dawn, every satellite in orbit around the Earth has crashed to the surface. The sun rises as usual, only it turns out to be a kind of cosmic special effect, not the real sun but its ersatz image. Yet though the real sun cannot be seen, its life-giving energies continue to reach the Earth, evidence that it still shines beyond the sphere enclosing the planet, a shield opaque to visible light but apparently not to all forms of radiation.
Nor to physical penetration. Space probes are launched, only to come crashing down almost at once. Yet according to their internal data, the satellites have spent weeks in orbit. Slowly, the truth dawns: Time is moving faster beyond the barrier (or, looked at another way, slower within). What is the time differential? Data reveal that one second on Earth equals 3.17 years outside; a terrestrial week is 1.9 million years. Scientists agree that the shield is the product of an advanced technology; they dub its makers Hypotheticals because so little is known about them, including their intentions. But one thing is sure: By the implacable mechanics of solar evolution, the bloated sun, in its death throes, will engulf the Earth in about 40 years. Whether the shield can protect the planet and its inhabitants from this cataclysm seems highly unlikely.
Flash forward 10 years. Tyler has become an M.D.; Diane has joined one of the many religious cults that see in the Spin (as it has come to be called) a sign of the end times foretold in the Bible; and Jason, a scientific genius groomed to succeed his father, E.D., at the helm of Lawton Industries, is spearheading global efforts, led by the United States, to escape the Hypotheticals' time trap. His bold idea is to terraform and colonize Mars. Thanks to the time differential, a program of launches spread over five years on Earth will translate to hundreds of millions of years on Mars—precious years in which evolution can do its work, resulting, or so Jason hopes, in a Martian civilization advanced enough to understand and deactivate the shield. At first, all goes well. Satellites spot evidence of agriculture on Mars ... and then the Red Planet vanishes behind a shield of its own.
But not before dispatching a lone astronaut back to Earth. This stranger in a strange land brings technology with the potential to save both planets ... or so he claims. The only problem is, no one on Earth can fully understand the "alien" tech, not even Jason, who nevertheless champions its use. Others, including E.D., believe that the old adage about Greeks bearing gifts applies to Martians too. But faced with the ticking time bomb of the dying sun, what choice does humanity have but to trust its unlikely savior?
A family drama amid Big Ideas
Spin is a novel of Big Ideas in the grand, sense-of-wonder tradition of Clarke, Bear, Benford and Baxter. And as Big Ideas go, it's hard to get much bigger than the shield, or Spin Membrane, as it's called. This inspired plot device allows Wilson, one of SF's most consistently intriguing writers, to play fast—but never loose—with evolutionary processes both biological and stellar, compressing dizzying scales of time into humanly comprehensible chunks. The Membrane is, of course, a BDO—Big Dumb Object—of the first order, but its technological basis is less important to Wilson than the practical, philosophical and psychological implications of its relativistic effects upon his characters and the universe. One of SF's distinctive qualities, often derided by mainstream critics as a weakness, is its literalization of metaphor, but Wilson's masterful exploitation of the Membrane's fictional possibilities provides an exhilarating demonstration of why precisely the opposite can be true.
Spin is also a family drama that would not be out of place on mainstream shelves. The Lawtons and the Duprees are tangled in an almost Faulknerian web of angst and bitterness, love and longing, rivalries between siblings and parents, and long-buried secrets surfacing to devastating effect. Jason and E.D. enact with a kind of cold-blooded ferocity the archetypal father-son pas de deux of competition, resentment and love. Meanwhile, Tyler carries a lifelong torch for Diane, who submerges her intellect and personality in a particularly repugnant brand of Christian fundamentalism.
The problem with Big Ideas and BDOs is that they tend to dwarf human beings, and Wilson is not able to completely escape this trap. While Jason emerges as a fully realized character, dominating the novel, Diane gets lost in the shuffle. Her masochistic embrace of an increasingly bizarre cult is never convincingly explained, and her relationship to Tyler, our narrator, on which half the story hinges, is equally problematic. Tyler's obsession with Diane is similarly murky, although his friendship with Jason is portrayed with depth and sensitivity, another high point. Because the narrative is split in two, with sections alternating between the past and a present (409 A.D.) in which Diane and Tyler are on the run, hunted by agents of the U.S. government for reasons that only gradually become clear, the book feels off balance: The latter storyline, despite its frenetic pace, is anticlimactic, and Diane and Tyler can't quite bear the dramatic load Wilson requires of them. Finally, the solution to the mystery of the Hypotheticals falls disappointingly short of the considerable ingenuity with which it is first propounded and elaborated. Even so, Spin is a provocative, frequently dazzling read.
