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.
