Customer Reviews

Spin

5 star:		(95)
4 star:		(47)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I managed to snag an advanced copy of this novel last week, which I finished in about a day and a half reading during lunch breaks, bathroom breaks and the hours before bedtime. As per usual, Wilson does an excellent job of keeping me up at night.

For those who are familiar with Robert Charles Wilson's work, "Spin" should come as no surprise. Most of his novels feature a conflicted protagonist who is caught up in storms of intrigue and extraordinary circumstances. Wilson's stories typically focus 70% on the characters and 30% on the science. His characters walk away from these experiences utterly changed, for better or for worse. Their arcs aren't always pleasant but usually realistic. You could easily put yourself into their shoes.

"Spin" is no exception.

As the previous reviewer pointed out, Wilson's one weakness is his endings. The endings are usually a rush to tie together loose ends, explain away anything that wasn't properly explained before. "Blind Lake" fell into this trap. "The Chronoliths" did not. Thankfully, "Spin" falls into the latter catagory.

Spin is a superb novel full of Big Ideas, but those Big Ideas don't come at the expense of rich character development as is so often the case with books of this sort. Wilson has a real knack for creating characters one can empathize with and can really grow to care about. The family relationship depicted here, between the narrator, Tyler Dupree, and his childhood friends Jason (the genius) and Diane (his first, unrequited love), is the real driving force of this novel, and is what makes it such a compelling page-turner. The prose is clean and fluid, and Wilson expertly paces the book, keeping the reader engaged and anxious to find out what comes next. This can be tricky in a novel that spans several subjective years (and billions of relativistic years), but Wilson pulls it off marvelously.

Spin is exactly the sort of novel that I think we need to see more of, one that infuses the reader with that gosh-wow sense of wonder that many writers seem to have forgotten is the reason we all fell in love with the genre in the first place.

Robert Charles Wilson's "Spin" tells the tale of the earth being cloaked in a time-warping membrane, put in place by unknown entities. It's also the tale of Tyler Dupree and his privileged best friends, twins born to the couple his mother works for as a maid.

The story weaves the past and the present, starting with Tyler's early life with his mother in a small guesthouse across the lawn from the big house. That's where the twins, Jason and Diane, reside uneasily with their powerful and sometimes cruel father and withdrawn, alcoholic mother.

One night the three youngsters sit talking on the lawn, peering in at a grown-ups' party in the big house. Suddenly, the moon and the stars are no longer visible. They're blocked by the membrane, which is quickly dubbed the Spin.

After that, the story becomes a search for knowledge.

The world wants to know the meaning of the Spin. Tyler wants to know his place in the world. To understand that, he must also understand his relationship with the twins. There's Jason, whose brilliance and hunger to know who put the Spin in place astound Tyler. And there's Diane, whose search for redemption breaks his heart.

This is also where "Spin" starts spinning in place. Does it want to be a science-fiction tale whose main characters come of age? Or a coming of age tale that takes place in a science-fiction setting? It's as if Wilson wants both, and as a result, almost ends up with neither.

There are compelling facets to "Spin," but there are also long passages where the story is beautifully worded, yet the action is plodding.

The ending could've been interesting had it been built to more quickly, and it's not a big enough payoff for the effort we go through to stick with the main characters as they struggle through life.

Those of you who want a fast-paced, simpler story should look elsewhere. Those of you who want great literature should also look elsewhere. Those of you who want to read something by a talented author we'll be hearing from again and again should read "Spin," mostly for its innovative ideas.

The problem with this book is that it never delivers the goods. It's either an idea in search of a story or a story in need of more interesting ideas.

The actions taken by the characters make zero impact on the final outcome of the Spin. None. *snore* Well, maybe the characters can save the novel? Nah. Jason Lawton is flat as a pancake, the obsessed scientist. Diane Lawton isn't much better. Tyler Dupree can't be called one dimensional because that would require that he actually do something other than hang around Jason and Diane.

How about the ideas? The Spin itself is kinda cool. It could have been the setting for a really interesting novel. Everything after that though... civilizations squander resources until they kill themselves, a big chain of intelligent asteroid huggers, and some explorations into the human response to certain doom. These ideas simply aren't explored enough to interest me.

A number of elements in the story are just cliched or clumsy. As an example, Tyler Dupree likes Jazz. This doesn't advance his character but it does get him out of a jam later. I guess I was supposed to pat Wilson on the back for that little detail but where other authors might make it a seemless affair, the first thought that came to my mind was "tacked on." The mean tycoon father, the alcoholic mother... have I stepped into a soap opera?

I'm not trying to say the novel is terrible but it's so... mediocre. Did any of the Worldcon members(the people who vote on Hugo Awards) actually think this deserved to be set up beside novels like "Double Star," "Dune," "Ringworld," "The Gods Themselves," and "Fahrenheit 451"? I'd like to award "Spin" a Big Meh.

As others have pointed out here, the story line is a nice one. Very personal and well written, although the dialog is bit boring. The book wanders for a while, but finally picks up once humans are sent to Mars and begin evolving on their own. The book is a page turner...at no point did I get "tired" of reading it, but ultimately there is no shock and awe at the end of this story. There is an explanation, of course, but it's rather anticlimatic. It left me wanting more. More story about what's on the other side of the arch, and the other connected worlds. Why don't they run into any other intelligent beings? That part is woefully missing. Now that would have made for a juicy ending, having all the intelligent beings are united at the end because of the arch. But no.

Why do authors (good authors!) fill a book with prose, then jam the ending in? The ending is why I read books. I want to know that the time I invest plodding through the story and characters will all be worth it in the end. I read to escape, not to "pass the time". This book was not that great an escape.

Reading Aurthur C. Clark is my all time favorite escape. He KNOWS how to write an ending. Unfortunately, I've read all his books!

I had to force myself to finish Spin, which was a disappointment. While I find this novel a definite improvement over the author's last (Blind Lake), on the whole I get the feeling that Mr. Wilson is having trouble finding a dependable voice. The first-person narrator of Spin could not be a less interesting character if you pulled him out of a line of people waiting to renew their drivers licenses in Medford, MA. He is given to ponderous statements like this (p. 50) "She also prayed....Praying to whom or for what I don't know. I don't know what people do when they pray." Probably just about anyone you stopped on the street today could answer that question if Tyler, the narrator, during the course of his life ever bothered have a conversation with a stranger. This is one of those deep observations that's supposed to be profound, but in fact comes across as so boneheaded, you put the book down and shake your head, you can't believe the narrator is so clueless about the human condition. It's just one of many lapses that completely drains Tyler of sympathy.

P. 327: "By comparison with the terraforming effort of previous years, the replicator launch was anti-climactic. It's results would be, if anything, greater and more subtle; but its very efficiency...failed as drama." I sort of feel like that's the problem with Mr. Wilson more often than not. His scenes fail as drama. He cannot write one action scene (and there are few enough in 450 pages to count on the fingers of one hand) to save his life. A ride in the trunk of a car, an explosion. Most of the book is one bedroom or office conversation after another, all about the Spin, and almost always between Jason the boy genius and Tyler. After two hundred pages, however, the sameness of the book's structure palls.

Mr. Wilson usually can create one or two solid characters in his novels, even when too often he surrounds them with overly familiar stereotypes. But Jason and Diane invite no sympathy because, somehow, Tyler doesn't convincingly convey any of his own. The twins' parents are standard stuffed shirts with predictable back-stories: Jason's cold ambitious and overbearing father E.D. and his predictably alcoholic out-of-touch mother Carol. For the short time that Tyler's own mother hangs around the novel before she dies of a stroke, he fails even once to make a real connection with her, and I can't help feeling that deep down Mr. Wilson himself doesn't have much interest in his characters either. All he cares about is the grand design that the latest batch of `Hypotheticals' has in store for mankind.

It may be time for Mr. Wilson to let go of the "something mysterious is being done to planet earth (again)" routine. He did a great job with Harvest, but the central SF events of Chronoliths and Darwinia and now Spin are tired and handled with no true sense of scale. I can't help thinking what a better job Bruce Sterling might have done with this material; he has a much better knack for full-blooded characters and dialogue than Mr. Wilson.

One night in the near future, the stars and moon suddenly disappear from the sky. The next morning, a normal looking sun appears to rise, but it is an illusion. Satellites soon reveal that a protective membrane has been placed around the earth by some powerful unknown intelligence. Inside the membrane time is passing normally. But outside the membrane, time is passing at 100 million years for every year on earth. The cause of the phenomenon is unknown. What seems certain is that in 40 earth years, the 4 billion year older sun will expand into earth's orbit and destroy it. A handful of scientists frantically try to study "the Spin" as the phenomenon becomes known and perhaps reverse it. But for the most part, the apparent certainty of extinction does little to change life on earth or human behavior.

It is easy to read the set up of Wilson's exciting new novel as a metaphor for our present. Warnings that we have already set in motion catastrophic and irreversible environmental changes and are consuming natural resources at an alarming rate can no longer be dismissed as alarmist fantasy. Even the more optimistic scenarios, such as Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, suggest that technological change is progressing so rapidly that within this century the human race as we know it will be so changed as to be unrecognizable.

On some level we understand this pessimism. It is no accident that Battlestar Galactica, where hapless and divided humans "battle" a superior foe, has replaced Star Trek (with its hopeful but false metaphor of the galaxy as a sea with infinite island paradises explored by a confident navy) as the best science fiction show on television. As the books's metaphorical beginning dramatizes, when we look in the night sky we now know that what is really there is a vast unfathomable darkness, against which the points of light that appear to fill the sky are less significant that grains of sand in an ocean. And yet for the most part we go on as we always have, mowing our lawns, buying gas grills, while outside our carefully constructed worlds natural forces and/or technological changes beyond our control are shaping our destiny.

If this is all there was to Spin, it would be a clever but unremarkable novel, like many sci-fi novels that have a intriguing set up but that ultimately fail in execution. (David Brin's The Postman and James Morrow's Towing Jehovah come to mind). But despite a few awkward moments, particularly in the first part, Spin is a satisfying, nuanced, and deftly executed reflection on science and faith.

The novel focuses primarily on four characters, E.D Lawton, his twin children Jason Lawton and Diane Lawton and childhood, friend and neighbor Tyler Dupree, and traces how each of them deal with the frightening reality of the Spin (as the phenomenon becomes known). Diane joins a religious cult and Jason immerses himself in the study of the Spin. E.D. uses the Spin to profit politically and financially, And Tyler immerses himself in his work. The characters are ultimately archetypes for ways of living, but they are relatively well developed archetypes, particularly Tyler and E.D. Only Simon, Diane's husband, seems to be little more than a plot device. Tyler, the narrator, is a softer ultimately redeemable Meersault from The Stranger (note Tyler's reaction to his mother's death).

Of course, Spin is ultimately a book about the ultimate scifi cliche, "the end of the world". While Wilson's premise is relatively original, he subtly but effectively pays homage to sci fi classics. The sudden appearance of the membrane recalls the appearance of Clarke's Overlords. The "Hypotheticals" who created the Spin recall the "Ethicals" of Farmer's Riverworld. There is a stranger from Mars. And there is a desperate and life altering journey in the heat of an apocalyptic sun, recalling a similar odyssey through the opposite climate extreme in Left Hand of Darkness. Most audacious of all, the ending takes place on a ship sailing into a new and hidden land! Somehow, though, these echoes are executed so as to build and riff on the themes of these predecessors, rather than simply imitate them. The result is a subtle and unpretentious novel about a very serious subject.

There are no answers here, although there is perceptive commentary. Wilson avoids the temptation to extrapolate current political trends to create a nightmare society. Instead, in Wilson's political landscape the left has all but disappeared but the moderate right holds the extreme right in check. But more than anything, political structures are portrayed as impotent in the face of technological, ecological, and social forces.

Ultimately, though, Spin embraces a guarded optimism about the future, particularly about the implications of biotechnology and artificil intelligence. It is hard not to read Spin as a response (although a sympathetic one) to Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Whereas Atwood recoils in horror at the promise of biotech, Wilson's vision is ultimately one of hope, bolstered by faith.

I picked up this book based on the story summary on the cover more than anything. I had not read anything else by this author, and probably won't.

It's not badly written at all, but there are aspects to the story that are off-putting. After a great setup things go downhill quickly. There were a few huge problems with this book. The first was that I never connected with any of the characters. The worst of which was the one-dimensional brother, whose sole quality is that he is obsessed with solving the mystery of the 'spin'. The sister and the friend fared only slightly better.

Another problem is the basic premise of the book. After completing the novel I couldn't think of any good reason why the earth was put in the spin membrane. If the beings who put it there were trying to save the earth, why speed up the destruction of the solar system? So the current generation can experience it? I just don't get it.

I also didn't like the pace of the story. It kind of died in the middle and then once things got going again, the author wrapped up the story in a few pages.

Overall, I don't feel strongly one way or the other about reading it or not reading it. It's kind of middle-of-the-road for me.

I'm in the minority here -- although I liked the opening premise (Earth-time proceeding at 1 year to 100,000 years for the universe at large), I felt the book went nowhere special from there, and the ending premise made no sense at all. First, I was not impressed by the character portrayals, which is critical to me. The monster-father was little more than an annoying plot device for his son to react against, and the son had no personality that I could discern. The daughter and the narrator were better drawn, but not by much. Also, I'm tired of SF in which one heroic intellect saves the world. Let's grow up a little, huh? **SPOILER WARNING** Then there's the ending, which is ridiculous in my estimation. Apparently, the sentient galaxy (or some such thing) put Earth into its special time-delayed mini-universe because we were running through Earth's resources too fast, so three billion years was needed to move a gateway to more resources into place. For crying out loud, if that took three billion years, how did they move the time-warp device into place overnight? (Twice, because they warped Mars halfway through the book.) Also, it's bizarre that the underlying problem was that we couldn't control our resource use, but the only solution was to give us a whole bunch more resources. You would think a book with coming-of-age pretensions would work on making us better able to live within our means, rather than wasting three billion years so we could continue being utterly profligate unitl the end of time.

The good things about the novel : First and foremost, huge idea, that is also fleshed out well till the end (unlike let's say Dan Simmons' Ilium sequel). This is quite an accomplishment, since nothing is explained until the last 5% of the book, where a seasoned reader is afraid of a) a sequel b) an abysmally poor ending. However, Mr Wilson pulls it off decently with a finale not exactly mind-boggling, but not frustrating either.
BTW, note to naive readers : the unorthodox sequence of the chapters serves exactly this purpose, to dealy as long as possible the climax.
Then, the characters. Some reviewers here are full of venom, but there are sf masterpieces with 1/10 of character development of the Spin. The characters are as confused as they should be given the singularity, and they connect pretty well. Sure, this is not Nabokov or Tolstoi, but had it been, then the whining would be about the lack of science. It's hard to be a sf writer, a lose lose situation a priori.
The bad things about the novel : Couple of silly sub-plots, especially the one about the mementos box, which alone shaves off a star.
The death of the Martian was beyond suspense of disbelief, given the police state the spin USA has fallen into. In "reality", there would be a convoy the size of a regiment around the Martian's car. So, sorry Mr. Wilson, since you probably devour Amazon critics, listen to your public : you found an easy way out in this one, and a fine writer like you should publicly declare mea culpa for slips like this. Add all these to some platitudinal twists and they amount to a book easily edited 50 pages shorter.
The overall feeling of the Spin : Imagine a diamond cutter, skilled and creative, who however produces stones with small, but perceptible flaws. I rate this book 3 1/2 stars.