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.
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call a power struggle.” “Which they lost?” “Oh no. They were firmly in control. At least for a while. They radicalized Jordan Tabernacle in a way that made a whole lot of us uncomfortable. Dan Condon was one of them, and he’s the one who got us involved with that network of loose cannons trying to bring about the Second Coming with a red cow. Which still strikes me as grotesquely pre- sumptuous. As if the Lord of Hosts would wait on a cattle- breeding program before gathering up the
“That’s a good idea, Dr. Dupree. You tell ’em Pastor Bob sent you. But be careful all the same.” º º º Pastor Bob Kobel had given me directions to Dan Condon’s ranch, which turned out to be a clean two-story farmhouse in 314 R O B E R T C H A R L E S W I L S O N a scrubby valley many hours from town. Not much of a ranch, though, at least to my untutored eyes. There was a big barn, in poor repair compared to the house, and a few cattle grazing on weedy patches of grama grass. As soon as
was also someone who had hitched his intellectual wagon to a team of lunatic-fringe Dispensationalists whose only argu- ment with the end of the world was that it had defied their detailed expectations. I didn’t want to offend him because I still needed him—Diane still needed him. So I said, “Does it matter what I consider myself?” “Just curious.” “Well—I don’t know. I guess that’s my answer. I don’t claim to know whether God exists or why He wound up the universe and made it spin the way
careers, my mother cleaned house for them. Somehow we managed to acknowledge these differences without making a big deal of it. “Okay,” Jason said, “can you point at Polaris?” S P I N 9 Polaris, the North Star. I had been reading about slavery and the civil war. There had been a fugitive slave song: When the sun comes back and the first quail calls, Follow the Drinking Gourd. The old man is waiting to carry you to freedom When you follow the Drinking Gourd. “When the sun comes back”
transiting the main road, trucks trying to reach some distant desa by morning. Maybe a patient hoping she was still here. Or maybe an addict looking for drugs. The knob-turning stopped. Quietly, I levered myself up and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. The clinic was dark, my cell was dark, the only light was moonlight through the high window . . . which was suddenly eclipsed. I looked up and saw the silhouette of En’s head like a hov- ering planet. “Pak Tyler!” he whispered. “En! You scared