Spin
Robert Charles Wilson
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 076534825X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 back yard 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.
The New York Times (6 September 2015)
The New York Times (01 October 2015)
The Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions
agricultural cycle and imposes ab- solute limits on the number of human lives the planet can sustain. We’ve coped a little better than has the Earth, but only because we were forced to recognize the problem from the very beginning of our civilization. Both planets were and are facing the possibility of economic and agricultural collapse and a catastrophic human die-off. Both planets were encapsulated before that end point was reached. “Perhaps the Hypotheticals understand that truth about
if he’d been idiotic enough to set it for an audible ring, calling him now might put him in jeopardy. Not that I was especially concerned for Simon’s welfare. But if he had left the phone with Diane, now was the hour. I pecked out the number. “Yes,” she said—it was Diane who answered—and then, inflection rising, a question, “Yes?” S P I N 373 Her voice was breathless and faint. Those two syllables were enough to beg a diagnosis. I said, “Diane. It’s me. It’s Tyler.” Trying to control
talking about their perception, not their morality. The death of any single human being— my death—might be meaningful to them, if they could see it in the correct context. But they can’t.” “They’ve done this before, though, created other Spin worlds—isn’t that one of the things the replicators discov- ered before the Hypotheticals shut them down?” “Other Spin worlds. Yes. Many. The network of the Hy- potheticals has grown to encompass most of the habitable zone of the galaxy, and this is
House fol- lowing Jason’s death. The most pressing was Diane, whose physical condition re- mained unchanged for days following the injection of the Mar- tian drug. She was nearly comatose and intermittently feverish, her pulse beating in her throat like the flutter of an insect wing. We were low on medical supplies and I had to coax her to take an occasional sip of water. The only real improvement was in the sound of her breathing, which was incrementally more re- laxed and less
moon and stank of manure. I hid the luggage in a dry place halfway up the embank- ment and pulled myself the rest of the way up, lying at an angle that concealed my body but allowed a view of the road, Ibu Ina’s concrete-box clinic, and the black car parked in front of it. The men from the car had broken in through the back door. They switched on more lights as they moved through the building, making yellow squares of windows with drawn blinds, but I had no way of knowing what they were