Spin - Hardcover

Wilson, Robert Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765309386 ISBN 13: 9780765309389

Publisher: Tor Books, 2005

Synopsis

After witnessing the onset of an astronomical event that has caused the sun to go black and the stars and moon to disappear, Tyler, Jason, and Diane learn that the darkness has been caused by a time-altering, alien-created artificial barrier and that the sun will be extinguished in less than forty years. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

"Robert Charles Wilson is a hell of a storyteller." --Stephen King

"One night the stars go out. From that breathtaking 'what if, ' Wilson builds an astonishingly successful melange of SF thriller, growing-up saga, tender love story, father-son conflict, ecological parable and apocalyptic fable in prose that sings the music of the spheres." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Spin

"Robert Charles Wilson is one of the best science-fiction writers alive, a fact borne out in his latest work... Spin is the best science-fiction novel so far this year." --Rocky Mountain News

"Wilson's most ambitious and most successful novel to date...Wide-ranging and well-crafted." --San Diego Union-Tribune on Spin

"The long-anticipated marriage between the hard sf novel and the literary novel, resulting in an offspring possessing the robust ideational vigor of the former with the graceful narrative subtleties of the latter, might finally have occurred in the form of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin. Here's a book that features speculative conceits as brash and thrilling as those found in any space opera, along with insights into the human condition as rich as those contained within any mainstream mimetic fiction, with both its conceits and insights beautifully embedded in crystalline prose....Wilson does so many fine things, it's hard to know where to begin to praise him." --The Washington Post

"Of all SF writers currently active, Robert Charles Wilson may well be the best at balancing cosmic drama with human drama...Spin is many things: psychological novel, technological thriller, apocalyptic picaresque, cosmological meditation. But it is, foremost, the first major SF novel of 2005, another triumph for Robert Charles Wilson in a long string of triumphs." --Locus

"One of SF's distinctive qualities, often derided by mainstream critics as a weakness, is its literalization of metaphor, but Wilson's masterful exploitation of the Membrane's fictional possibilities provides an exhilarating demonstration of why precisely the opposite can be true...Spin is also a family drama that would not be out of place on mainstream shelves...Spin is a provocative, frequently dazzling read." --SCIFI.COM

"A subtle and thought-provoking writer. Just when the reader thinks he knows where Wilson is going, he finds himself somewhere else entirely." --Robin Hobb on Robert Charles Wilson

"Robert Charles Wilson continues to surprise and delight. I can't think of another science fiction writer who understands the strengths of the genre so well and who works with such confidence within its elastic boundaries...Wilson never loses sight of the human angle. His theme is the importance of communication, which, as his characters come to learn, should never remain one-way." --The New York Times on Blind Lake

"A superior SF thriller." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Blind Lake

"Fizzing with ideas...Intense, absorbing, memorable." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) on Blind Lake

"The steely quiet of Blind Lake draws you in like a magnet...Wilson does not ever raise his voice, which does not mean he speaks softly. How he speaks is still. In his calm, stony exile's gaze upon the prisons of the world, and in his measured adherence to storylines that say that everything may become a little better with much work, he is the most purely Canadian of all the writers brought together here, and Blind Lake is the finest Canadian novel of all these." --John Clute, Toronto Globe and Mail

From the Back Cover:

"HERE'S A BOOK that features speculative conceits as brash and thrilling as those found in any space opera, along with insights into the human condition as rich as those contained within any mainstream mimetic fiction, with both its conceits and insights beautifully embedded in crystalline prose...The time is the day after tomorrow, and three adolescents--Diane and Jason Lawton, twins, and their best friend, Tyler Dupree--are out stargazing. Thus they witness the erection of a planet-spanning shield around the globe, blocking out the universe. Spin chronicles the next 30-odd years in the lives of the trio, during which 300 billion years will pass outside the shield, thanks to an engineered time discontinuity. Jason, a genius, will invest his celibate life in unraveling cosmological mysteries. Tyler will become a doctor and act as our narrator and as Jason's confidante, while nursing his unrequited love for Diane, who in turn plunges into religious fanaticism. Along the way human-descended Martians will appear, bringing a drug that can elevate humans to the Fourth State, 'an adulthood beyond adulthood.' But will even this miracle be enough to save Earth?"
--The Washington Post

"SPIN IS MANY THINGS: psychological novel, technological thriller, apocalyptic picaresque, cosmological meditation. But it is, foremost, the first major SF novel of 2005, another triumph for Robert Charles Wilson in a long string of triumphs."
--Locus

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0765309386
• ISBN 13: 9780765309389
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 364