(no subject)
From Analog
It's a safe bet that Robert Charles Wilson's latest, Spin, will be on the next round of award ballots. The premise is simple, albeit a bit bizarre: One night, the stars go out and satellites come tumbling out of the sky. A barrier has been erected around the Earth. The Sun, or a facsimile, shines through, and astronauts who hover above it for weeks come down only seconds after it went up. The reasons are entirely mysterious, but it seems to many that it is a fair presumption that aliens - soon known as the Hypotheticals - are involved.
The characters are more complicated. Tyler Dupree is just ten when it happens. He is in the yard of the Big House with his friends Jason and Diane Lawton. His father was once the partner of Jason's Dad - E.D. - in an enterprise aimed at commercializing aerostats as communication platforms. After he died in a highway accident, E.D. invited Tyler's mother to become the Lawtons' housekeeper and live in the guesthouse on their estate. Jason, a genius at science and engineering even when young, is being groomed to be his father's heir. To E.D., Diane is entirely secondary, but to Tyler, she is something else. At ten, he hardly understands what that "else" might be, but he knows there is a bond. Their mother, Carol Lawton, is an alcoholic.
The loss of comsats with the Big Blackout means no telephone, no Internet, no global TV. But E.D. Lawton's aerostats are the ideal replacement. Soon things are up and running again, and E.D. is wealthy and powerful. Research reveals that the barrier involves time, and the universe outside is spinning merrily along. Earth is caught in a bubble of slow time, a day passing for every hundred million years outside, and it is soon apparent that it will be no more than a few decades before the Sun expands to roast its planets and dies. E.D. gets a research effort going, with Jase in charge, utterly obsessed with understanding and if possible solving the mystery. Diane turns to religious extremes. Tyler goes into medicine, and in due time he must do his best to help both Jase and Diane deal with severe illness.
What could one do if one day's effort produced a hundred million years of result? One answer is to take advantage of the expanding Sun and its warming of Mars. Send bacteria and plants and animals and finally humans. Take a couple of years to do it all, and then send up a satellite to contact the new civilization. Do they have answers? Do they have answers that Earthly humans can or will use? Different questions, and if we have some idea that answers exist because of the way Wilson has chosen to tell his story - a few days at the very end interspersed with prolonged recollections - we don't know the specifics until the last few pages.
All I will say about those specifics is that they are as grandiose in scope and sweep as anyone could wish. They unify everything, they impose structure on time, space, and fate, and Olaf Stapledon (SF's first cosmic visionary) would have loved Wilson's vision.
Don't miss this one.
http://www.robertcharleswilson.com/