I was so impressed by his work on The Chronoliths that I went right ahead and jumped into this book without hesitation. Of course, I was not disappointed. At least not too much, but I'll get to that later.
It is the near future, as these stories so often are, and one night the stars go out. The night sky goes black, with none of the familiar lights that have guided us throughout human history. Within minutes, the entire network of satellites circling the globe plummet to Earth, leaving modern telecommunications in shambles. Many people, naturally, panic, fearing that the night would be endless, but no - the sun comes up in the morning. The bright, yellow, light-giving.... oddly uniform and uneventful sun.
The Earth, as it turns out, has been enveloped in a kind of cocoon, what thinkers of the age would call The Spin. Inside the Spin, life goes on. There's no stars or moon, and the sun is artificial, but other than that, n...more
I was so impressed by his work on The Chronoliths that I went right ahead and jumped into this book without hesitation. Of course, I was not disappointed. At least not too much, but I'll get to that later.
It is the near future, as these stories so often are, and one night the stars go out. The night sky goes black, with none of the familiar lights that have guided us throughout human history. Within minutes, the entire network of satellites circling the globe plummet to Earth, leaving modern telecommunications in shambles. Many people, naturally, panic, fearing that the night would be endless, but no - the sun comes up in the morning. The bright, yellow, light-giving.... oddly uniform and uneventful sun.
The Earth, as it turns out, has been enveloped in a kind of cocoon, what thinkers of the age would call The Spin. Inside the Spin, life goes on. There's no stars or moon, and the sun is artificial, but other than that, nothing much changes. High-tech balloons help solve the problem solved by the loss of communications satellites, and everyone goes about their lives.
Outside the Spin, the universe is flying by. For every second that passes on Earth, 3.17 years passes outside the black shield. One minute means the passage of 190 years. One hour, 11,412 years. One day, 273,888 years. One year on Earth is 100,037,592 years to the universe at large. Which means that within the next generation, the sun will reach the end of its life, growing to a red giant that would turn the Earth into so much space dust, Spin or no Spin.
The big question, then, is who - or what - did this, and why?
From reading these two books, I have noticed a few things about Wilson's style. Further reading may disprove my theories, but we'll see.
For one, he seems to enjoy dealing with the sociological side to sci-fi. In The Chronoliths, he imagined how the world would react to a tyrant whose coming was announced 20 years before he ever took power - militant cults, youth movements and generational discord, of course. In this book, he does the same - what would the world do if it only had about 50 years to live? The answer, according to Wilson, is splintering messianic fundamentalist religion and violent crime. For the public at large, it seems like there is indeed no hope for the planet, so they naturally turn to the Lord or hedonism - sometimes both at the same time.
For our narrator, however, all is not lost. He is friends with one of the greatest minds of his generation, a man who might not be able to stop the Spin, but who could probably figure out what it's there for - if it doesn't kill him first.
Which brings me to the second thing I've noticed about Wilson's work. So far, he's worked through a first-person narrator, who is admittedly "chronicling" the events of the previous few decades into a book for posterity. I have no real problem with that except that by the time the narrator is writing the book, he is more or less out of any real danger. This is less true for Tyler Dupree in this book than it was for Scott Warden in The Chronoliths, but as you get to the end of the book, you realize that the important part of the story really ended years before. So the actual end is kind of anticlimactic - the narrator may be in a tough spot before he gets to the last page, but you know that he's out of the real story already and is destined to survive. Otherwise how could he have written the book?
Or maybe I shouldn't be reviewing at 12:30 in the morning....
Anyway, it was good. If I see any more of Wilson's work floating around, I'll most definitely pick it up....less
Spin 
