Teaser

When a mysterious field envelops the earth, humanity is cut off from the rest of the universe. Some believe science will provide a solution, while others seek refuge in religion. What none can escape is the passage of time . . .

Review

I’ve spent a fair bit of the past two years reading my way, in dribs and drabs, through the winners of various science fiction awards. These books tend to be either stone-cold classics, or by very popular authors, so are generally quite easy to find. Which makes it a little odd, on the face of it, that I had managed to go so long without reading a Hugo award winner from the 2000s. Indeed, there was a noticeable gap in my Hugos knowledge between 1993 winner A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge and 2013 winner Redshirts, by John Scalzi.

One notable trend in the 2000s was that fantasy seemed to take over the Hugos. Neil Gaiman won twice, J.K. Rowling won once, and Susannah clakre burst onto the scene. Lois McMaster Bujold also won her fourth best novel award with a fantasy entry, rather than her usual favourite, the Vorkosigan Saga. my thoughts on fantasy and science fiction competing for the same awards are too complex to go into here, but slap bang in the middle of all these fantasy winners, it’s remarkable to see Spin, which is about as traditional a science fiction novel as you could imagine. It’s a book that I personally did not enjoy all that much, but it is undeniably the sort of book you’d expect to win a Hugo award.

The core of the book is this: Three children bear witness to a cosmic event that cuts off the earth from the rest of the universe. The titular Spin is an anomaly that slows down time on earth while the rest of the universe continues at a normal rate. Therefore, as the next thirty years pass by on Earth, tens of thousands of years pass by outside of the Spin. The book covers both humanity’s efforts to escape from the Spin, while also detailing the personal lives of those three children as they grow to adulthood in the strange new world.

I’m going to get the characters out of the way first. This was the weak half of the novel for me. Yes, I’m the person who rarely becomes interested in deep character arcs, but I do feel Spin is weaker in these aspects than it is in others. The characters are forgettable at best, annoying at worst. if they were stand-ins for various viewpoints, I’d have been more forgiving, but so much time is dedicated to their fallings out, reunions, and romances, that the book soon becomes bogged down.

Thankfully, the science half of science fiction is here to save us once again. So much of the book is concerned with theory crafting about the nature and purpose of the spin, and eventually about its potential creators. These thought experiments are the best part of the book by a country mile. Robert Charles Wilson has a real knack for making these tangents interesting, even if they don’t always go anywhere. in the second half of the book, when extra-terrestrial visitors arrive (no spoilers on their nature or role), things kick up a notch. The governmental and societal reactions all feel genuine and without hyperbole. it’s top notch stuff.

One aspect I did notice creeping in is the level of meta-reference to other science fiction stories, particularly those involving Mars. I read another book recently (review coming soon) where similar references pulled me out of the story, but with this story of children growing up in what is essentially a present-day setting, the references felt well-earned and entirely natural. If an alien arrived on my doorstep tomorrow, I would definitely start thinking about science fiction stories about just such an event.

Spin is far from a perfect novel, but it is a worthy winner of the Hugo, and a shining beacon of traditional SF in a sea of modern fantasies.

Book Stats

• The Spin #1
• First Published 2005
• 471 pages