From Publishers Weekly
One night the stars go out. From that breathtaking "what if," Wilson (
Blind Lake, etc.
) builds an astonishingly successful mélange 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. The narrative time oscillates effortlessly between Tyler Dupree's early adolescence and his near-future young manhood haunted by the impending death of the sun and the earth. Tyler's best friends, twins Diane and Jason Lawton, take two divergent paths: Diane into a troubling religious cult of the end, Jason into impassioned scientific research to discover the nature of the galactic Hypotheticals whose "Spin" suddenly sealed Earth in a "cosmic baggie," making one of its days equal to a hundred million years in the universe beyond. As convincing as Wilson's scientific hypothesizing is--biological, astrophysical, medical--he excels even more dramatically with the infinitely intricate, minutely nuanced relationships among Jason, Diane and Tyler, whose older self tries to save them both with medicines from Mars, terraformed through Jason's genius into an incubator for new humanity. This brilliant excursion into the deepest inner and farthest outer spaces offers doorways into new worlds--if only humankind strives and seeks and finds and will not yield compassion for our fellow beings.
Agent, Shawna McCarthy. (Apr. 14)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of 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 mélange 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
"An astonishingly successful mélange of SF thriller, growing-up saga... and apocalyptic fable in prose that sings the music of the spheres."
(
Publishers Weekly )
"Wilson is one of the best science-fiction writers alive… 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 )
"Wilson does so many fine things, it's hard to know where to begin to praise him."
(
The Washington Post )
"Yhe first major SF novel of 2005, another triumph for Robert Charles Wilson in a long string of triumphs."
(
Locus )
"Spin is a family drama that would not be out of place on mainstream shelves... a provocative, frequently dazzling read."
(
SCIFI.COM )
