Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
The 2006 Hugo Winner Reviewed by Colin Harvey
A short bibliography and review of Spin, the latest Hugo Award winning novel by Robert Charles Wilson
Robert Charles Wilson has been writing since 1985, but it’s only in the last few years that he’s begun to make a name for himself as one of the most dependable of that rare breed, a writer of stylish yet serious yet straightforward SF. No frills, no extrapolated characters living extrapolated lives that alter them beyond recognition, no flamboyant writer’s tricks. Just good ideas, and good solid characterization, told in straightforward yet accomplished prose.
Yet it’s taken him a while to establish his own quiet identity. His first novel, A Hidden Place, was published in 1986, yet though set in the same fictional universe, the Depression Mid-West of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the late Tom Reamy’s marvellous Blind Voices, the author it reminded me most of with its tale of the redemptive powers of love was Theodore Sturgeon.
His next novel, Memory Wire, flirted with the then-fashionable sub-genre of Cyberpunk, and a favourite, A Bridge of Years, owes more than a passing nod to Clifford D. Simak, with its bucolic rural setting and time tunnel back to a gentler, kinder year, 1963, even though this was Simak with teeth. It was also badly flawed with its too-early reveal of the enemy, but it was still one of the outstanding novels of a year – 1992 – that was one of the strongest in memory for major novels, with Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book grabbing the awards, although fought to a standstill by Vernor Vinge, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s first volume of the major trilogy of the whole decade.
The dying years of the second millennium seemed perfectly reflected in Wilson’s bittersweet, poignant works, and with each passing novel, his reputation grew, until the mid 1990’s, he earned Nebula nominations for Mysterium and his novelette ‘The Perseids’, and Hugo nominations for Darwinia and his novelette ‘Divided By Infinity.’ Further nominations followed for The Chronliths and Blind Lake, and it seemed only a matter of time before Wilson won a major award.
Now it has happened, with Spin.
Spin is the story of the night the stars went out, blocked out by an alien barrier, and of the effects of the next decades on humanity, as typified by fraternal twins, Jason and Diane Lawton, and Tyler Dupree, whose unrequited love for Diane is the emotional core of the novel and who becomes a doctor, while Diane embraces an increasingly desolate religion, and Jason leads the project to free the Earth of the Spin’s isolation, even if that means condemning humanity to death.
For the Spin is not an impenetrable barrier, but a membrane, slowing the Earth in relation to the rest of the universe, and protecting it from the harmful side-effects of such a process. Experiments with satellites reveal that one second of terrestrial time is equivalent to three and a sixth years of time in the rest of the universe. So two manned probes launched a minute apart will land a hundred and ninety years apart.
And all life on Earth will end in about forty years time, as the sun swells to a red giant, and engulfs the Earth.
Spin is a powerful and thought-provoking novel that by showing the emotional, economic and spiritual effects on humanity of the membrane makes it far more realistic than the back-page summary led me to think. It has justifiably won the Hugo Award, and I think will rank as one of the outstanding novels of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
