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# 2009 apr 18 (sat) 12:49 :: Review: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

Spin is an end-of-the-world story. One night while childhood neighbors and friends Tyler, Jason, and Diane are outside looking at the night sky, all the stars disappear. The Earth has been surrounded by some sort of barrier that blocks out the starts and slows down time for everything inside it. The story follows the three friends as they, along with the rest of the world, adjust to this new reality. Spin is full of really grand, cosmological ideas that are explored in the context of a very human and even tender story of unrequited love and family relationships and friendships over time. Wilson's prose is more matter-of-fact than poetic, but his gentle treatment of his characters is pretty rare in SF and reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. It would make a good read for people who are put off by a lot of other science fiction.

Tyler, Jason, and Diane each take different paths in dealing with the possible end of the world (or the "rapture-for-scientists", to borrow Ken MacLeod's turn of phrase). Diane falls into a millenarist Christianity that goes through several phases when the world doesn't end as immediately as they expect. Jason pursues science and tries to find some sort of solution, and Tyler takes a middle road into medicine, serving as a bridge between the two and the reader's window into the story.

As a moderate Christian, I appreciated Wilson's treatment of religion. I often cringe when I have to wade through SF authors' naive or even malicious caricatures of foaming-at-the-mouth religious lunatics. Surprisingly, Carl Sagan, that scourge of religious conservatives, is one of the few exceptions to this rule. In `Contact <http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780671004101>`_, main character Ellie interacts with a fundamentalist preacher who turns out to be surprisingly sympathetic and has a scientist colleague (appropriately named Valerian) who has a pretty balanced view of religion and science. Perhaps Sagan's wife Ann Druyan (credited as a co-author on an early paperpack edition of Contact) had some influence on him in his later years. Anyway, in Spin, Wilson shows that he is either on friendly terms with some Christians, or has done his homework, or at least doesn't feel like he has an axe to grind. He does put the word 'chiliasm' in his characters' mouths quite a bit, though, which I'm pretty sure I've never heard except from anthropologists, seminarians, or SF writers.

There aren't any fancy ray-guns or jetpacks in Spin, but there are some big, juicy cosmological ideas here, revealed deftly and which I don't want to spoil for you. Come to think of it, the book reminds me of Contact on several levels, and that's a good thing. I really enjoyed this book, and I recommend it to any and all, though maybe not to Charles Stross. :)

As an afterward, I got this book as a free download from publisher Tor back in July. It was some kind of promotion, so I don't know if it's still available, but definitely check it out. Tor seems like a really interesting publisher, doing cool things like releasing Cory Doctorow's Little Brother under a Creative Commons license. I'm definitely going to look for more of Wilson's work - Spin was a nice read.

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